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THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


BY 
ISRAEL  Z A  NO WILL 

Plaster  Saints 

Chosen  People 

Italian  Fantasies 

Ghetto  Comedies 

Ghetto  Tragedies 

Jinny  the  Carrier 

The  Melting  Pot 

Children  of  the  Ghetto 

The  World  and  the  Jew 

The  King  of  Schnorrers 

The  War  God,  A  Play 

The  War  for  the  World 

The  Xext  Religion,  A  Play 

The  Principle  of  Nationalities 


THE 
VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


BY 

ISRAEL  ZANGWILL 


"England!  awake!  awake!  awake! 
Jerusalem  thy  sister  calls!" 

Blake 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1921 

All  rights  reserved 


Copyright,   1920  and  1921, 
By  THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 


Set  up  and  eleetrotyped.      Published    February,   1921 


BY  WAY  OF  EXPLANATION 

The  title  of  this  book  was  struck  out  in  a  letter  that  appeared 
in  the  London  Times  within  a  few  months  of  the  outbreak  of 
the  Great  War,  and  though  I  know  how  little  the  great  Jew  who 
has  just  passed  away  would  have  agreed  with  many  of  its  pages, 
I  am  glad  to  have  his  honoured  name  thus  bound  up  with  the 
book  whose  title  he  unwittingly  inspired. 

November  23rd,  1914. 

To  the  Editor  of  The  Times. 

Sir, — The  interview  with  Mr.  Jacob  Schiff  reported  by  your 
Washington  correspondent  —  the  proposal  for  a  permanent 
peace  that  shall  end  not  only  this  war,  but  war  —  comes  as  the 
one  gleam  of  light  in  the  world's  darkness.  But  why  almost 
extinguish  it  under  the  head  of  "  German  Press  Campaign  "  ? 
And  why  does  he  speak  of  Mr.  Schiff's  "  brief  for  Germany  "  ? 
As  one  associated  for  many  years  in  philanthropic  work  with 
this  noblest  of  millionaires  I  should  like  to  testify  that,  despite 
his  early  associations  with  Germany,  he  is  one  of  the  most 
patriotic  Americans  I  have  ever  known.  Descended  from  a 
long  line  of  Jewish  Rabbis  and  scholars  —  one  of  his  ancestors 
was  Chief  Rabbi  of  the  Great  Synagogue,  London,  in  the  18th 
century  —  Mr.  Jacob  SchifF  might  himself  have  sat  to  Lessing 
for  the  portrait  of  "  Nathan  der  Weise,"  and  in  proposing  a 
conference  to  end  Prussian  militarism  —  and  every  other  —  he 
speaks  not  as  the  mouthpiece  of  Berlin,  but  with  the  voice  of 
Jerusalem. 

Yours  faithfully, 

Israel  Zangwill. 


IKI 

VK 

D5 

HI 

£3 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Proem:     The  Quest 1 

The  Voice  of  Jerusalem 6 

The  Position  of  Judaism 137 

Songs  of  the  Synagogue 152 

The  Legend  of  the  Conquering  Jew 166 

Shylock  and  other  Stage  Jews 238 

Language  and  Jewish  Life 254 

The  Territorial  Solution  of  the  Jewish  Problem      .      .  263 

The  Old  Clo'  Man 286 

The  Mirage  of  the  Jewish  State 288 

"Our  Own":     A  Cry  Across  the  Atlantic 306 

The  Polish-Jewish  Problem 309 

The  Goyim 324 

The  People  of  the  Abyss 327 

Converted  Missionaries 333 

Two  Josephs  that  Dreamed  — 

I.  Joseph  Fels 337 

II.  Joseph  Jacobs 349 

The  Pillar  of  Fire 366 

Epilogue:     The  Majesty  of  Armenia 367 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


PROEM:  THE  QUEST 

At  first  I  told  the  parlourmaid  I  would  not  see  the  stranger 
from  London,  so  angry  was  I  at  this  increasing  practice  of  in- 
trusion into  my  rural  privacy:  this  unheralded  descent  by  the 
ill-timed  train  that  brought  beggars  and  bores  to  my  door  in  the 
very  middle  of  the  luncheon  hour.  To  aggravate  matters  and 
my  righteous  wrath  there  was  no  train  to  deport  them  till  tea- 
time,  unless  they  were  jetted  back  with  the  velocity  of  a  tennis- 
return,  and  the  stroke  was  not  easy.  Thus,  as  the  village  held 
no  place  of  rest,  amusement,  or  provender,  and  it  was  the  dry 
interval  even  at  the  foodless  inn,  and  as  violent  rain-storms 
would  maliciously  coincide  with  these  visitations,  I  must  per- 
force shelter,  feed  and  entertain  my  persecutors,  to  the  destruc- 
tion of  my  working-hours.  My  soul  was  yet  bitter  with  the 
memory  of  the  gaunt,  hollow-eyed  lady  who  only  the  week 
before  had  profited  by  her  opportunity  to  pour  out  for  two 
hours  on  end  —  as  if  in  emulation  of  the  rain  without  —  a  tragic 
torrent  of  words,  a  pitiless,  pitiful  flow,  unrelieved  even  by  a 
comma,  some  sordid  but  unintelligible  tale  of  a  shell-shocked 
son  in  a  lunatic  asylum.  The  only  point  at  all  clear  from  her 
impassioned  incoherence  had  been  that  not  even  Heaven  could 
help  her,  and  the  wisdom  of  Shakespeare  had  been  borne  in  on 
me,  as  so  often  of  late: 

"  Things  without  remedy  should  be  without  regard." 

At  the  best  it  was  not  easy  to  work  with  the  insistent  dull 
booming  of  the  guns  from  across  the  Channel,  that  unresting 
reminder  of  civilisation  in  its  agony  of  dissolution ;  of  millions  of 
breaking  hearts.  The  one  compensation  the  war  brought  me  — 
I  used  to  tell  myself  grimly  —  was  that  it  cut  off  the  bulk  of  my 
callers  from  quartering  themselves  upon  me  for  the  night,  for 
they  were  mainly  aliens,  friendly  or  neutral,  and  the  coast  was  a 
"  prohibited  area." 

The  latest  pilgrim  bore  a  Polish  name:  I  was  to  that  extent 
safe.  Perhaps  soothed  by  this  circumstance  or  some  digestive 
process,  I  modified  my  harsh  instruction  to  the  parlourmaid. 

1 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

The  man  could  wait  in  my  study.     But  I  steeled  myself  against 
inviting  him  to  join  my  meal,  which  for  the  rest  was  half  over. 

At  the  first  glimpse  of  him,  sitting  patient  in  my  study,  deep 
in  his  book,  my  heart  smote  me.  A  softness  emanated  from  his 
dreamy  eyes,  his  face  covered  with  a  reddish  down,  his  short 
russet  beard,  his  neat  tweed  suit,  his  grey  shirt  and  collar.  I 
saw  at  once  he  was  not  of  the  tramp  species,  whether  of  the 
malodorous,  haggard,  beery  type  or  of  the  genteel  variety  by 
which  I  used  to  be  taken  in  before  I  noted  that  the  boots  with 
which  it  had  tramped  from  distant  towns  were  immaculately 
polished.  But  I  was  not  sure  that  the  Luftmensch  species  — 
the  airman  without  a  machine  who  floats  like  a  gossamer  the 
wide  world  over  —  was  not  the  more  troublesome  to  tackle.  For 
this  is  a  Jewish  type,  assertive  that  "  all  Israel  are  brethren," 
and  insistent  on  its  right  to  travel  and  study  at  the  fraternal 
expense,  without  even  preliminary  consultation.  My  visitor 
was  visibly  of  this  high-handed  order.  Futile  to  ask  him,  "  Am 
I  my  brothers  keeper?  "  I  should  at  the  very  least  have  to 
pay  his  fare  back  to  London. 

He  began  —  cunningly,  I  thought  —  with  some  questions  upon 
the  book  he  was  reading,  which  proved  —  ominous  confirmation 
of  my  worst  fears  —  a  work  of  my  own.  I  answered  his  queries 
sceptically,  slipping  —  as  soon  as  the  maid  was  out  of  earshot  — 
into  the  German  he  spoke  more  easily  than  English,  and  await- 
ing almost  impatiently  the  moment  of  transition  into  finance. 
But  there  was  no  sign  of  precipitation.  He  had  written  a  little 
German  book  on  the  Kabbalah  —  printed  in  the  East  End  before 
the  war  —  and  offered  me  a  paper-covered  copy,  already  in- 
scribed to  me  with  Oriental  floridity.  All  this  was  in  the 
formula :  the  only  question  was,  would  he  name  the  price  or  leave 
it  to  me.  But  there  was  no  light  of  cupidity  in  those  gentle 
brown  eyes :  he  observed  mournfully  that  he  had  sent  it  to 
many  Englishmen  of  light  and  leading,  as  well  as  to  foreign 
monarchs.  But  not  one  had  even  acknowledged  its  receipt: 
there  seemed  no  interest  in  the  nature  of  God,  or  His  relations 
to  man. 

Little  by  little,  but  still  half-incredulous,  I  began  to  feel  that 
this  interest  was  the  only  one  that  appealed  to  him.  For,  as  he 
deviously  reached  the  purpose  of  his  visit,  it  grew  obvious  that  he 
was  a  dreamer  of  the  Ghetto,  whose  inherited  means  from  the 
parental  pawnshop  fortunately  sufficed  for  his  moderate  wants 
—  assuredly  he  ate  no  luncheon  that  day  —  and  that  his  only 
hunger  was  for  God. 

2 


PROEM:  THE  QUEST 

A  life-long  ponderer  over  the  old  mystic  Hebrew  books,  he  was 
still  groping  for  more  theologic  light:  even  the  Kabbalah  had 
left  much  obscure. 

"  But  whom  then  can  I  consult?  "  he  demanded  in  despair, 
when  I  modestly  disclaimed  any  special  illumination  or  informa- 
tion. "  I  came  to  London,  knowing  it  was  the  capital  of  the 
world,  and  that  there  I  would  find  all  the  great  Englishmen,  and 
I  took  it  for  granted  they  would  be  glad  to  compare  notes  with 
me  about  God.  But  no  !  I  cannot  get  to  hear  of  anyone  who  is 
willing  or  able  to  discuss  divine  philosophy.  Surely  you  can 
give  me  the  name  of  somebody." 

My  mind  ran  over  the  seven  millions  of  Greater  London, 
coursing  to  and  fro  like  a  frantic  sheep-dog.  "  There  used  to 
be  people,"  I  murmured  apologetically,  with  an  eye  on  the 
despised  Victorians  of  my  youth.  "  But  I  really  cannot  think 
of  anybody  who  lives  in  London,  or  even  the  suburbs." 

"  But  with  all  your  great  statesmen !  "  he  protested. 

"  Divinity  is  not  their  Fach"  I  explained  defensively. 
"  Perhaps  Mr.  Balfour,"  I  wondered,  with  a  hopeful  memory 
of  Gifford  Lectures. 

"  I  have  read  him,"  he  replied  unexpectedly.  "  But  he  is  not 
deep.     What  has  God  to  do  with  Doubt?  " 

I  was  taken  aback,  and  there  was  a  pause  of  musing  silence. 
"  I  went  to  Downing  Street  yesterday,"  he  avowed  presently, 
"  to  ask  Mr.  Lloyd  George  to  talk  to  me  about  God." 
"  Lloyd  George !  "  I  echoed,  startled. 

"  Yes,"  he  said,  simply.  "  He  often  talks  as  if  he  knew  all 
about  God.  With  him  there  is  never  any  Doubt.  I  thought  he 
might  give  me  the  light  I  need.  And  I  too  might  be  able  to  help 
him." 

I  stared.     "  But  he  didn't  see  you?  " 
"  He  did  not  refuse." 
"  You  saw  him  ?  "  I  gasped. 

"  Not  yet,"  he  replied  tranquilly.  "  On  second  thoughts  I 
did  not  like  to  ring  the  bell,  because  I  thought  after  all  he  does 
not  know  me.      But  you  will  give  me  a  letter  to  him." 

I  saw  that  with  his  saintly  craft  he  had  at  last  arrived  at  his 
point. 

"  Oh,  but  it  is  impossible !  "  I  cried,  instinctively.  "  Aus- 
geschlossen!  " 

"  You  don't  know  him?  "  he  asked,  disappointed. 
I  admitted  we  were  not  absolutely  unacquainted.     But  the 
idea  of  the  Prime  Minister  of  the  British  Empire  at  this  su- 

8 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

preme  crisis  in  world  affairs  —  with  the  war  going  against  us  too 
just  then  —  according  an  interview  to  an  obscure  individual 
seeking  God  with  a  German  accent,  seemed  to  me  of  the  last 
fantasy.  With  an  uneasy  levity  I  urged  that  Downing  Street 
during  the  war  was  a  "  prohibited  area  "  for  theology.  But 
he  would  not  see  it.  Surely  God  was  the  thing  that  mattered 
most,  he  insisted. 

I  tried  to  soothe  his  disappointment  by  recalling  other  per- 
sonages who  might  be  willing  to  chop  theology ;  provincial  pro- 
fessors, even  Oxford  Dons.  But  he  said  with  a  sigh  that  they 
would  not  be  handy  for  talking  to,  as  new  difficulties  presented 
themselves. 

Embarrassed,  I  offered  him  coffee,  but  he  refused  gently.  I 
foraged  desperately  in  my  spiritual  larder,  scouring  its  recesses 
for  scraps  of  Hebrew  theology  from  Saadia  to  Crescas ;  showily 
produced  the  Plotinian  mysticism  of  Ibn  Gabirol  (the  mysteri- 
ous Avicebron,  inspirer  of  Duns  Scotus),  whose  poems  I  hap- 
pened to  be  translating,  and  somewhat  placated  my  taskmaster 
by  disparaging  the  rationalism  of  Maimonides  in  favour  of  that 
poetry  and  Moses  Ibn  Ezra's.  Brightening,  he  recalled 
Bachya's  proof  of  the  Unity  of  God,  and  told  me  of  an  Arabic 
work  on  the  vegetative,  animal,  and  universal  soul  falsely 
ascribed  to  Bachya,  in  which,  I  learnt  with  surprise,  the  un- 
known mediaeval  philosopher  had  anticipated  Bergson's  thesis 
that  intellectual  disturbance  through  cerebral  injury  was  no 
proof  of  soul's  dependence  on  body,  inasmuch  as  the  brain  was 
but  the  medium  of  the  soul,  which  could  not  work  through  a 
damaged  instrument.  But  this  liveliness  flickered  out  again 
when  he  remembered  that  I  did  not  live  in  London  and  was 
beyond  his  means  for  frequent  consultation.  Unless,  perhaps, 
I  would  correspond ! 

Vehemently  I  pointed  out  that  such  subtleties  could  be  solved 
only  viva  voce,  demanded  the  Socratic  method ;  one  could  thresh 
out  more  in  a  quarter  of  an  hour  than  in  a  month  of  letter- 
writing. 

"  That  is  what  I  say,"  he  admitted.  "  As  from  the  fire  of  the 
soul  was,  according  to  your  Ibn  Gabirol,  the  body  created,  so 
from  the  sparks  struck  out  by  two  souls  is  the  body  of  Truth 
created.  Then  I  must  write  myself,  asking  Lloyd  George  to 
talk  to  me,"  he  concluded  with  resignation. 

"  Useless,"  I  warned  him.      "lie  would  never  see  your  letter." 

"  Never  see  my  letter?  "  he  repeated  in  naive  surprise. 

"  No,  there  are  barriers  of  secretaries  between  him  and  his 

4 


PROEM:  THE  QUEST 

correspondence.  Just  think!  He  has  to  direct  the  greatest 
war  in  all  history !  " 

"  Is  that  a  reason  for  not  thinking  a  little  about  God?  " 

I  strove  to  appease  him  with  a  cigarette.  But  he  waved  it 
austerely  aside. 

And  when  I  accompanied  him  to  the  station  —  for  thus  far  had 
my  politeness  grown  —  he  was  still  puzzling  over  the  immense  and 
incredible  situation  that  there  was  nobody  in  the  metropolis  of 
the  world  who  could  or  would  talk  with  him  about  the  only  thing 
that  really  mattered  to  humanity,  and  that  in  particular  the 
man  in  charge  of  the  greatest  war  in  history  would  not  devote  an 
hour  now  and  again  to  the  study  of  the  nature  of  God. 

But  gradually  his  face  resumed  the  old  brooding  light. 

The  may  and  the  fool's-parsley  gleamed  thick  in  the  sunlit 
hedges,  the  larks  trilled  skywards,  the  cuckoo's  golden  phrase 
came  glamorously  pervasive,  the  young  wheat  waved  green ;  and 
as  we  passed  through  fields  of  daisies  and  buttercups  we  must 
fain  skirt  the  crouching  calves,  chewing  unperturbed  by  the 
drone  of  the  guns.  That  sinister  booming  penetrated  as  little 
to  my  companion.  The  voice  of  Jerusalem  was  all  he  heard. 
Even  the  thwarted  purpose  of  his  pilgrimage  was  forgotten, 
and  Lloyd  George  had  passed  from  his  ken.  He  was  thinking 
only  of  the  Eternal. 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


As  I  was  preparing  for  the  press  this  collection  of  my  Jewish 
essays,  gathered  from  every  period  of  my  working  life,  I  received 
an  article  upon  Islam  from  my  friend,  Sir  Harry  Johnston,  with 
a  provocative  sentence  specially  marked.  "  Judaism,"  it  ran, 
"  had  virtually  dissolved  into  Christianity  a  hundred  years  be- 
fore the  coming  of  Christ,  and  it  is  only  a  foolish  petulance 
which  prevents  the  Jews  of  to-day  from  avowing  themselves 
followers  of  Christ."  I  retorted  that  the  sentence  was  an  Irish 
bull.  Why  should  Christians  who  preceded  Christ  avow  them- 
selves his  followers?  One  might  more  defensibly  say  that  it  is 
only  a  foolish  snobbishness  that  prevents  his  followers  from 
avowing  themselves  as  Jews.  In  this  they  would  certainly  be 
following  him,  for  he  notoriously  proclaimed  himself  as  one  who 
came  not  to  destroy  the  Jewish  Law  but  to  fulfil  it. 

Sir  Harry  Johnston  is,  however,  not  so  wrong  in  regarding 
the  Jews  of  the  first  century  b.c.  as  having  largely  reached  the 
Christian  position,  in  so  far  as  the  adjective  applies  to  Semitic 
ethics  and  not  to  the  Greek  metaphysics  and  sacramental  no- 
tions with  which  the  new  Jewish  sect  entangled  itself.  From 
the  account  given  by  Josephus  of  the  Essenes  in  particular,  it 
would  seem  that  even  in  its  specific  developments  of  communism 
and  celibacy,  Christianity  had  already  made  its  appearance  in 
Juda?a.  They  were  the  first  in  the  ancient  world  to  condemn 
slavery.  "  Their  example,"  observes  Lord  Acton  in  his  essay 
on  "  Freedom  in  Antiquity,"  "  testifies  to  how  great  a  height 
religious  men  were  able  to  raise  their  conception  of  society  even 
without  the  succour  of  the  New  Testament."  Similarly,  Sir 
John  Seeley  begins  his  celebrated  work  "  Ecce  Homo,"  with  the 
remark  "  The  Christian  Church  sprang  from  a  movement  which 
was  not  begun  by  Christ.  When  he  appeared  upon  the  scene 
the  first  wave  of  this  movement  had  already  passed  over  the  sur- 
face of  the  Jewish  nation."  This  is  true,  even  if  by  this  move- 
ment we  read  the  Hellcnisation  of  the  simple  Semitic  erhic  or  its 
separation  from  any  peculiar  race.  Philo,  a  contemporary  of 
Jesus,  born  nearly  twenty  years  earlier,  though  his  philosophy 

6 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

of  the  Logos  and  his  conception  of  world-proselytism  were  re- 
jected by  the  Jewries  of  his  own  age,  was  accepted  by  the  early 
Christians  almost  as  one  of  themselves ;  and  it  is  to  the  Church 
Fathers  that  we  owe  the  preservation  of  the  bulk  of  his  works. 
Kuenen,  although  he  regards  Christianity  as  completely  super- 
seding Judaism  and  as  not  traceable  specifically  either  to  Essen- 
ism  or  Philoism,  is  yet  compelled,  like  Renan,  to  see  its  roots 
in  Palestinian  Judaism  as  a  whole,  and  to  describe  the  whole 
ethical  atmosphere  in  Palestine  as  a  psychological  preparation 
for  the  emergence  of  Jesus,  between  whom  and  the  shepherd 
Amos,  eight  hundred  years  before  him,  there  was  no  incommen- 
surable gap.  And  if  the  essence  of  the  Christian  ethic  be  taken 
as  sacrifice,  or  vicarious  atonement,  the  willingness  to  exemplify 
it  appears  a  millennium  and  a  half  earlier  in  Moses  than  in 
Jesus.  "  And  it  came  to  pass  on  the  morrow,"  says  the  histo- 
rian of  Exodus  (Chapter  XXXIL,  30-32),  "that  Moses  said 
unto  the  people,  Ye  have  sinned  a  great  sin :  and  now  I  will  go  up 
unto  the  Lord ;  peradventure  I  shall  make  an  atonement  for  your 
sin.  And  Moses  returned  unto  the  Lord,  and  said,  Oh,  this 
people  have  sinned  a  great  sin,  and  have  made  them  gods  of  gold. 
Yet  now,  if  thou  wilt  forgive  their  sin ;  and  if  not,  blot  me,  I  pray 
thee,  out  of  thy  book  which  thou  hast  written."  But  the  reply 
put  into  the  Lord's  mouth  marks  the  dividing  line  between  the 
creeds.  "  Whosoever  hath  sinned  against  me,  him  will  I  blot 
out  of  my  book."  Justice  in  fact  is  the  essential  note  of  Juda- 
ism as  Love  is  that  of  Christianity.  Judaism  of  course  no  more 
discarded  Love  than  Christianity  was  able  to  dispense  with 
Justice  —  it  is  merely  a  question  of  proportions  —  but  it  is  this 
stern  trumpet-sound  of  the  Old  Testament  that  has  discon- 
certed all  the  sentimentalists  who  bleat  about  the  cruel  Jehovah 
till  Zeppelins  throw  bombs  on  themselves,  when  they  out-Herod 
Herod  in  their  savage  thirst  for  vengeance,  not  merely  paying 
no  attention  to  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  but  disregarding  the 
warning  of  Jehovah :  "  Vengeance  is  Mine." 

So  far  from  the  Gospels  of  Love  and  Justice  being  sharply 
divided  between  the  two  Testaments,  it  is  but  two  chapters  later 
in  Exodus  that  we  find  the  Jewish  God  defining  Himself  as  "  The 
Lord,  the  Lord  God,  merciful  and  gracious,  longsuffering  and 
abundant  in  goodness  and  truth,  keeping  mercy  for  thousands, 
forgiving  iniquity  and  transgression  and  sin." 

But  this  "  Christian  "  Jehovah  refuses  to  forget  his  Jewish 
side,  and  the  definition  winds  up :     "  And  that  will  by  no  means 

7 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

clear  the  guilty;  visiting  the  iniquity  of  the  fathers  upon  the 
children,  and  upon  the  children's  children,  unto  the  third  and  to 
the  fourth  generation." 

There  may  be  here  the  profound  idea  that  God  can  forgive 
but  that  He  cannot  forget ;  that  is  to  say,  He  cannot  undo  the 
results  of  evil,  which  work  themselves  out  to  the  third  and  fourth 
generation,  however  the  sinners  may  have  found  forgiveness. 
This  is  not  the  place  to  delve  more  deeply  into  these  spiritual 
subtleties.  I  wish  merely  to  show  what  little  truth  there  is  in 
the  current  antithesis  between  the  Old  and  the  New  Testament, 
when  that  test  is  applied  to  the  Bible  which  is  the  last  to  which 
it  is  exposed  —  namely,  the  process  of  reading  it. 

With  a  curious  arrogance  the  translators  of  the  authorised 
version  imported  into  the  Old  Testament  by  way  of  head-lines 
their  dogmatic  interpretation  of  the  text,  and  thus  started  its 
readers  with  a  misleading  prepossession,  much  as  newspaper 
articles  are  almost  irremediably  falsified  by  too  summary  head- 
lines. This  is  why  —  apart  from  the  mistakes  of  the  trans- 
lators —  not  one  Christian  in  a  million  has  ever  really  read  the 
Old  Testament.  These  deceptive  interpolations  are  particu- 
larly concerned  with  dramatising  the  Old  Testament  into  a  con- 
tinuous prophecy  of  the  coming  Saviour.  The  line  of  proof  is 
as  absurd  as  the  sense  is  distorted  or  misrendered.  And  yet 
the  basic  idea  is  sound.  For  the  Old  Testament  contains, 
though  in  a  jumble  of  strata,  all  the  traces  of  the  evolution 
from  the  crude  psychology  of  primitive  civilisation  to  that  form 
of  Jewish  psychology,  popularly  known  as  Christian.  It.  is  this 
process  of  spiritualisation  culminating  in  the  soul  of  Jesus 
which  is  the  true  miracle  to  which  the  Bible  testifies,  and  the 
only  one  as  to  which  its  testimony  is  convincing.  The  only 
miracle,  too,  which  Science  cannot  destroy :  Science,  that  for 
all  its  practical  boons,  has  wrought  but  negatively,  so  far  as  all 
deeper  values  are  concerned ;  Science  that,  like  the  illuminant 
in  Milton's  Hell,  is  "  no  light  but  rather  darkness  visible."  Its 
only  contribution  to  real  knowledge  has  been  this  revelation  of 
our  ignorance,  this  destruction  of  the  cosy  conceptions  of  Space 
and  Time  and  History  within  which  we  nestled.  Like  a  grim 
hand  withdrawing  a  curtain  from  the  window  of  a  warm  lighted 
room,  Science  has  revealed  the  impenetrable  blackness  that 
hedges  us  around,  the  terrifying  perspectives  of  infinity  and 
evolution. 

Amid  these  tenebrosities  and  in  the  din  and  tumult  of  the 

8 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

age,  the  note  of  which  has  insidiously  become  that  very  Bis- 
marckian  bellow  which  the  war  was  professedly  waged  to  silence, 
the  still  small  voice  of  Jerusalem  remains  our  only  music.  That 
accent  of  Reason  and  Love  is  heard  at  its  clearest  in  some  of  the 
sayings  of  Jesus,  but  long  centuries  before  it  had  made  itself 
audible  in  the  pastures  of  Mesopotamia  and  amid  the  hills  of 
Palestine,  and  still,  wherever  the  race  of  Jesus  wanders,  there 
are  lips  on  which  the  ancient  fiery  coal  is  laid. 

II 

The  soul  of  this  "  peculiar  people  "  is  best  seen  in  the  Bible, 
saturated  from  the  first  page  of  the  Old  Testament  to  the  last 
page  of  the  New  with  the  aspiration  for  a  righteous  social 
order,  and  an  ultimate  unification  of  mankind.  Of  these  ideals 
the  race  of  Abraham  originally  conceived  and  still  conceives 
itself  to  be  the  medium  and  missionary.  Wild  and  rude  as  were 
the  beginnings  of  this  people,  frequent  as  were  its  backslidings, 
and  great  as  were  —  and  are  —  its  faults,  this  aspiration  is 
continuous  in  its  literature  even  up  to  the  present  day.  There 
is  every  reason  to  believe  that  the  historic  texts  of  the  Old 
Testament  were  redacted  in  the  interests  of  this  philosophy  of 
history,  but  that  pious  falsification  is  very  different  from  the 
self-glorification  of  all  other  epics.  Israel  appears  throughout 
not  as  a  hero  but  as  a  sinner  who  cannot  rise  to  his  role  of 
redeemer,  of  "  servant  of  the  Lord  " —  that  role  of  service,  not 
0^mmaace*.lor .which. _  his  people  was  "  chosen."  The  Talmud, 
the  innumerable  volumes  of  saintly  Hebrew  thought,  the  Jewish 
liturgy,  whether  in  its  ancient  or  its  medieval  strata,  the 
"  modernist "  platforms  of  reformed  American  Synagogues,  all 
echo  and  re-echo  this  conception  of  "  the  Jewish  mission."  As 
I  have  often  said,  the  people  of  Christ  has  been  the  Christ  of 
peoples,  and  this  both  in  its  apostolate  and  in  its  martyrdom. 
"  Nathan!  Nathan!  Ihr  seid  ein  Christ!  "  cries  the  friar  to  the 
old  Jewish  sage  in  Lessing's  fine  play.  "  By  God,  you  are  a 
Christian !     There  never  was  a  better  Christian !  " 

Christianity,  qua  its  ethic  of  love  and  pity  and  self-sacrifice, 
is  at  bottom  a  question  of  psychology:  it  is  the  evolution  of  the 
human  spirit  to  a  plane  as  much  transcending  the  natural  man's, 
as  the  species  homo  transcends  the  animal.  To  the  biologist 
this  upward  movement  may  be  a  leap  in  the  dark  —  a  "  sport," 
a  freak  of  fate  or  freewill  —  to  the  supernaturalist  it  may  be  a 

9 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

divine  impulsion.  But  whatever  its  scientific  explanation,  the 
Jews  had,  as  Sir  Harry  Johnston  almost  perceives,  reached  this 
phase  of  evolution  centuries  before  the  rest  of  the  world  —  it  is 
doubtless  what  their  prophets  felt  when  they  claimed  them  as  a 
Chosen  People  and  thus  sought  to  deepen  and  strengthen  this 
line  of  evolution.  Thus  while  the  incongruity  of  missions  to  the 
Jews,  subsidised  by  peoples  who  have  never  yet  reached  the 
psychological  plane  of  ancient  Israel,  is  grotesquely  obvious, 
the  process  of  conversion  cannot  be  applied  even  to  these 
European  stocks  themselves,  for  they  are  still  in  the  crude 
psychic  stage  of  self-assertion  and  conquest.  Their  Chris- 
tianity was  never  more  than  an  imposition  from  without,  which 
then  soon  transformed  to  their  own  psychology.  They  were 
as  little  affected  by  their  conversion  as  the  prehistoric  Celtic 
menhirs  of  the  West  of  England,  when  a  cross  was  scratched 
over  them  to  adapt  them  to  Christian  use.  "  Est-ce  qu'il  y  a 
des  Chretiens?  "  demands  the  freethinker  in  Diderot's  "  Entre- 
tien  d'un  philosophe,"  "  Je  n'en  ai  jamais  vu."  "  Nothing  can 
be  done,"  wrote  George  Tyrrell  in  one  of  his  letters,  "  till  the 
Roman  Curia  is  converted  to  Christianity.  There  is  more  hope 
of  the  Jews."     There  is  indeed. 

In  the  remarkable  remonstrance  to  the  Inquisitors  of  Spain 
and  Portugal  inserted  by  Montesquieu  in  the  twenty-fifth  book 
of  his  "  Esprit  des  Lois,"  the  Jewish  protester  displays  a  com- 
plete comprehension  of  real  Christianity,  pointing  out  that 
there  is  no  difference  between  the  Japanese  who  burn  Christians 
and  the  Christians  who  burn  Jews,  and  begging  the  Inquisitors 
if  they  cannot  behave  as  Christians  to  behave  at  least  as  men. 
"  Si  vous  avez  cette  verite,"  the  Jew  observes  mordantly,  "  ne 
nous  la  cachez  pas  par  la  maniere  dont  vous  nous  la  proposes." 
In  the  recent  war,  though  a  Christian  psychology  has  revealed 
itself  here  and  there  among  the  followers  or  products  of  the 
Church,  the  old  Berserker  psychology  has  been  the  dominating 
influence.  It  was  not  even  always  sicklied  over  with  the  pale 
cast  of  sophistication,  for  German  thought  had  reverted  to  the 
Greek  sophists  with  their  doctrine  of  might  as  right,  though 
the  Allies  who  bettered  the  German  instruction  by  an  illegiti- 
mate blockade,  still  sanctimoniously  preserved  their  lip-worship 
of  Christ,  and  combining  the  language  of  Mr.  Chadband  with 
the  pinchings  of  Mr.  Quilp,  continue  to  this  day  to  ban  their 
enemies  from  their  great  brotherhood  of  peace  and  righteous- 
ness.    Even  Christmas  could  bring  no  truce  in  the  trenches 

10 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

except  once,  when  the  spirit  of  the  dead  Jew  suspended  the 
savageries  of  the  living  Christians.  But  it  was  from  the  ranks 
and  not  from  the  rulers  that  this  beautiful  moment  sprang,  and 
officialdom  soon  descended  to  nip  in  the  bud  so  appropriate  a 
celebration  of  Christ's  birthday.  It  even  proceeded  to  exploit 
the  solemn  festivals  of  the  common  Church  as  heaven-sent 
opportunities  for  unexpected  attack. 

But  it  sufficed  to  have  had  a  mother  of  Jewish  blood,  for 
Montaigne  to  become  the  channel  of  thoughts  upon  the  Spanish 
conquest  of  Mexico  which  had  found  no  expression  from  "  the 
Pope,  God's  Vice-gerent  on  earth,"  to  whom  the  King  of  Castile 
stood  indebted  for  his  territorial  greatness.  "  Who,"  asks 
Montaigne,  "  ever  enhanc'd  the  price  of  merchandize  at  such  a 
rate?  So  many  cities  levell'd  with  the  ground,  so  many  nations 
exterminated,  so  many  millions  of  people  fallen  by  the  edge  of 
the  sword,  and  the  richest  and  most  beautiful  part  of  the  world 
turn'd  upside  down,  for  the  traffick  of  pearl  and  pepper; 
mechanick  victories  !  Never  did  ambition,  never  did  animosities 
engage  men  against  one  another  to  such  a  degree  of  hostility 
and  miserable  calamity." 

A  semi-Jewish  parentage  similarly  explains  how  Jean  Bodin, 
though  steeped  in  some  of  the  superstitions  of  his  day,  was  the 
first  great  political  philosopher  to  preach  tolerance  and 
progress.  He  was  even  suspected  of  Judaising,  such  was  his 
respect  for  the  Old  Testament  and  his  neglect  of  the  New, 
though  his  critics  do  not  seem  to  have  had  the  biological  clue  to 
his  psychology.  And  his  complementary  in  action,  the  great 
French  Chancellor,  Michel  de  l'Hopital,  who  practised  what 
Bodin  preached,  staving  off  the  Inquisition  and  keeping  the 
peace  between  Christian  sects,  was  also  half  a  Jew.  It  is 
equally  significant  that  the  book  which  foresaw  that  a  modern 
war  would  cripple  Europe  was  written  by  the  Russian  Jew, 
Bloch,  the  inspirer  of  the  Hague  Conference,  and  that  the  only 
General  in  that  war  whose  account  of  his  triumphs  is  pene- 
trated throughout  by  loathing  for  the  necessity  for  them,  is  the 
Australian  Jew,  Sir  John  Monash.  "  Minds  are  conquered  not 
by  armies,  but  by  love  and  magnanimity,"  said  Spinoza.  It  was 
no  Father  of  the  Church  but  the  worldly-wise  author  of 
"  Proverbs  "  who  said :    "  If  thine  enemy  is  hungry,  feed  him."  * 

i  In  a  letter  to  The  Times  (August  6th,  1920)  Mrs.  Bramwell  Booth  at- 
tributes the  saying  to  Christ,  though  of  course  it  appears  only  in  an  epistle 
of  Paul  (Romans,  xii.  20),  who  was  obviously  quoting  from  Proverbs.  It 
seems  strange  that  a  leader  of  the  Salvation  Army  should  not  know  the  New 

11 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  The  Jews,"  asserted  the  Rabbi  of  Venice,  in  1637  —  and  Italy 
is  the  country  in  which  animals  notoriously  have  no  souls  — 
"  never  torment,  or  abuse,  or  put  to  any  cruel  death  any  Brute 
Beast  " ;  it  is  not  surprising  that  it  was  a  Jew  who  founded  the 
Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Cruelty  to  Animals. 

Disraeli  went  too  far  when  he  said,  "  All  is  race :  there  is  no 
other  truth,"  for  the  culture  superimposed  by  the  environment 
upon  the  hereditary  mentality  is  a  very  considerable  factor  of 
the  adult  psychology,  and  he  seems  to  have  overlooked  that  in 
the  case  of  Western  .Jews  this  factor  is  equally  present,  varying 
inter  alia  the  nationality  in  every  country.  For  nationality, 
though  often  confused  with  race,  and  treated  as  though  it 
sprang  into  existence  by  some  divine  fiat,  perfect,  fixed  and 
immutable  —  political  thinking  being  still  in  its  pre-Darwinian 
period  —  is  of  purely  psychological  genesis,  a  product  of 
environment.  So  far  from  nationalities  being  fixed,  political 
law  in  the  natural  world  is  for  ever  creating,  hybridising,  or 
eliminating  them,  and  all  three  processes  are  at  work  upon  the 
scatterings  of  the  vile  corpus  of  Israel.  Similarly,  except 
perhaps  among  the  Hottentots  or  other  stationary  savage 
tribes,  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  pure  race,  races  always  being 
alloyed,  or  at  least  modified,  by  any  new  milieu,  and  according 
to  Maurice  Fishberg,  the  American-Jewish  anthropologist, 
the  Jew  includes  Teutonic,  Slavonic,  Turanian,  Mongoloid, 
Negroid,  Spanish,  Assyrian  and  other  types.  Nevertheless, 
Disraeli  was  in  advance  of  the  thought  of  his  time  in  drawing 
attention  to  the  relative  fixity  of  biological  strains. 

When,  according  to  the  eleventh  chapter  of  Numbers,  a 
young  man  came  running  to  tell  Moses  that  Eldad  and  Medad 
were  prophesying  in  the  camp,  and  when  Joshua,  then  the  under- 
ling of  the  Master,  begged  Moses  to  forbid  them,  that  great 
man  with  his  wonted  magnanimity  answered :  "  Enviest  thou 
for  my  sake?  Would  God  that  all  the  Lord's  people  were 
prophets  and  that  the  Lord  would  put  his  spirit  upon  them !  " 

If  the  spirit  cannot  be  said  to  rest  on  every  Israelite,  there 
is  no  doubt  that  the  same  racial  intuition  which  led  to  the 
proclamation  of  the  unity  of  the  universe  through  the  one  God, 
leads  to  the  perception  of  the  brotherhood  of  humanity  under 
the  common  fatherhood,  and  that  the  faculty  of  dreaming  mil- 
lennial visions  of  a  warless  world  is  more  widespread  among  the 
people  of  Isaiah  than  among  any  other.     This  is  a  fact  that 

Testament,  but  the  mis-attribution  to  Christianity  of  all  that  is  best  in 
Judaism  is  characteristic. 

12 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

could  be  established  by  comparative  statistics.  The  press- 
bureaus  or  societies  of  international  pacifism  will  be  found 
mainly  directed  by  men  and  women  of  the  race  whose  salutation 
was  not  "  How  do  you  do  ?  "  but  "  Peace  to  you !  "  And  two 
Jews  —  Professor  Asser  and  Alfred  Fried  —  are  among  the  few 
men  who  have  been  awarded  the  Nobel  Peace  Prize.  No  one 
has  laboured  more  for  the  Pacifist  ideal  than  the  inventor  of 
Esperanto,  the  late  Dr.  Zamenhof,  the  Russo-Jewish  oculist 
who  truly  strove  to  heal  the  blindness  of  humanity.  For  the 
unity  of  speech  at  which  he  laboured  was  to  him  merely  the 
outward  sign  of  the  inner  unity  of  mankind.  If  he  sought  to 
undo  the  curse  of  Babel,  it  was  in  order  to  bring  the  peace  of 
Jerusalem.  Amid  the  barbaric  welter  generated  by  that  mili- 
tary ideal  of  which  Prussia  offered  the  supreme  expression,  in  a 
planet  seething  and  rumbling  with  animosities,  and  streaked 
with  volcanic  fires,  this  obscure  Russian  Jew  managed  to  set 
myriads  of  every  race,  creed  and  colour,  meeting  in  the  concord 
of  a  common  tongue,  the  very  name  of  which  brought  the  gospel 
of  hope. 

"  That  men  form  one  universal  brotherhood,  that  they  spring 
from  one  common  origin,  that  their  individual  lives,  their  nations 
and  races,  interbreed  and  blend  and  go  on  to  merge  again  at  last 
in  one  common  human  destiny  upon  this  little  planet  amidst  the 
stars,"  is,  according  to  Mr.  Wells,  the  conclusion  which  science 
and  history  alike  reach  by  their  investigations.  But,  as  he 
admits,  all  the  world-religions  had  reached  it  by  inspiration  and 
insight.  This  conclusion  was  in  fact  the  starting-point  of 
Hebrew  literature,  declaring  as  it  did  that  we  are  all  sons  of 
Adam,  and  that  the  colour-varieties  sprang  equally  from  the 
sons  of  Noah :  the  moral  value  of  the  teaching  is  independent  of 
its  historic  exactitude.  In  the  very  eagerness  of  the  Jew  to 
assimilate  himself  to  every  other  people  is  the  unconscious  ex- 
pression of  a  sense  of  universal  fraternity.  He  has  served  as  a 
connecting  link  not  only  between  all  modern  peoples,  but  with 
the  vanished  peoples  of  antiquity,  the  Assyrians,  the  Medes,  the 
Babylonians.  If  the  Jew  Paul  proved  that  the  Hebrew  word 
was  universal,  the  Jews  who  rejected  his  teaching  have  proved 
the  universality  of  the  Hebrew  race.  Mr.  Wells  has  pointed 
out  that  history  is  taught  from  national  standpoints,  to  the 
national  glory  and  to  the  total  destruction  of  perspective. 
Each  history  is  like  a  corridor  on  which  many  doors  give,  but 
what  the  people  in  the  rooms  did  before  they  came  into  the 

13 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

corridor,  or  after  they  had  banged  the  door  behind  them,  the 
pupil  is  never  shown.  That  is  not,  however,  the  case  with  the 
student  of  Jewish  history.  He  is  compelled  to  keep  his  eye  on 
all  the  chambers  of  world-history  in  every  period,  for  the  Jew 
has  lived  with  every  people,  and  by  his  ability  to  share  the  life 
of  them  all  has  proved  indirectly  that  they  are  all  brothers. 
One  touch  of  Jewry  makes  the  whole  world  kin. 

Ill 

It  does  not  follow,  of  course,  that  because  Jews  are  pacifists, 
pacifists  are  Jews,  or  that  the  peace-ideal  finds  no  prophets 
among  the  Gentiles.  Even  though  an  Oriental  origin  should  be 
established  for  Virgil's  Sibylline  Eclogue,  Sully  and  St.  Pierre 
were  French,  so  was  Fenelon  (whose  "  Telemaque "  scarified 
military  glory),  Rousseau  was  Swiss,  the  most  systematic  inves- 
tigation of  the  subject  came  from  a  German,  Kant,  and  not 
even  political  passion  has  yet  branded  President  Wilson, 
General  Smuts  or  Lord  Robert  Cecil  as  Jewish.1  Nevertheless, 
these  great  men  are  far  less  rooted  in  the  national  psychology 
than  the  Jewish  pacifists.     They  are  isolated  trees,  not  a  forest.' 

Commenting  on  the  Amritsar  Debate  in  Parliament,  The 
Times  told  us  that  the  House  was  very  angry  with  Mr. 
Montagu,  who,  presenting  to  it  a  sharp-cut  alternative  —  race 
domination  or  partnership  —  affronted  with  his  Jewish  men- 
tality the  deepest  instincts  of  Englishmen  abhorring  generalisa- 
tion and  accustomed  to  move  inductively.  Put  into  plain 
language  this  means  that  the  English  motto  is :  Make  sure  of 
your  interest  and  let  the  principle  take  care  of  itself.  If  this 
were  true,  then  Mr.  Montagu  could  exhibit  no  finer  patriotism 
than  to  contribute  the  Jew's  ethical  mentality  to  the  intellectual 
assets  of  England  —  quite  apart  from  the  fact  that  he,  if  any- 
body, will  thus  save  India  for  England.  He  has,  in  fact,  been 
doing  truer  Jewish  work  than  any  his  relative,  Sir  Herbert 
Samuel,  can  accomplish  in  Palestine. 

Addressing  the  Zionists  on  the  error  of  precipitation  or  of 
expecting  perfection  at  a  bound,  Lord  Robert  Cecil  said:  "  If 
I  may  venture  as  a  Briton  to  give  you  any  advice,  I  will  ask  you 
to  remember  the  great  quality  by  which  we  British  have 
achieved  some  success,  and  that  is  the  desire  that  we  have  to 
make  things  work  —  not  to  desire  perfection  in  a  moment,  but 

i  Lowell,  however,  claimed  the  Cecils  as  of  Jewish  origin. 

14 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

to  throw  our  whole  energy  into  making  whatever  we  have  to  do 
a  success  in  itself."  Amusingly  enough  this  is  the  very  exhor- 
tation addressed  to  Lord  Robert  by  his  worldly-wise  uncle,  Mr. 
Balfour,  and  if  I  may  venture  as  a  Jew  to  give  the  literally  noble 
lord  any  advice,  it  is  to  throw  away  this  British  side  of  him  in 
favour  of  his  prophetic  Hebrew  vein.  The  greatness  of  his 
life-work  already  stands  compromised  by  his  concessions  to  the 
practical.  The  world  has  been  ruined  by  its  practical  men. 
True,  nothing  must  be  jerrybuilt,  but  neither  will  sound  work- 
manship avail  if  the  architect's  plan  is  defective.  If,  as  Lord 
Robert  says,  "  Well  begun  is  half  done,"  it  is  equally  true  that 
"  111  begun  is  half  undone."  This  has  certainly  happened  with 
his  League  of  Nations,  which  is  developing  with  the  same  for- 
tuitousness as  the  British  Empire,  whose  "  success  "  is  by  no 
means  so  exemplary  as  Lord  Robert  imagines.  The  flaws  in 
its  planless  foundation  will  surely  undermine  the  whole  imperi- 
alist structure,  unless  it  is  established  afresh  on  that  basis  of 
partnership  which  Mr.  Montagu  urges. 

It  may  be  doubted,  however,  whether  The  Times  is  correct  in 
discerning  so  definite  a  mental  breach  between  East  and  West. 
The  Labour  Party  seems  to  have  no  difficulty  in  establishing 
general  ethical  principles  of  foreign  policy.  Cobden,  Bright, 
Morley,  and  Lord  Courtney  were  not  of  the  East,  yet  they 
steered  a  straight  course  by  a  priori  principles.  Is  it  not 
rather  that  the  present  House  of  Commons,  elected  in  the  flush 
of  war-triumph,  is  peculiarly  representative  of  the  mentality 
of  the  mob?  Far  be  it  from  me  to  take  advantage  of  the 
implication  of  The  Times  that  the  only  British  citizens  with 
principles  for  foreign  politics  are  of  Mr.  Montagu's  race.  As 
little  is  it  my  wish  to  claim  —  as  Dr.  Stanton  Coit  seems  to 
imagine  I  do  —  that  no  religious  inspiration  or  ethical  loftiness 
can  be  found  before  or  outside  Israel :  Hellenism  and  Buddhism 
have  undeniably  produced  noble  utterances,  and  so  has  Christi- 
anity after  the  Gospels  (which  are,  of  course,  exclusively 
Jewish).  Even  the  much-abused  Machiavelli  wrote  in  The 
Prince:  "  There  are  two  ways  of  deciding  any  contest,  the 
one  by  laws,  the  other  by  force.  The  first  is  peculiar  to  men, 
the  second  to  beasts."  The  difference  between  the  Jewish  and 
all  other  religious  or  ethical  maxims  and  ideals  lies,  however,  in 
the  fact  that  they  have  a  dynamic  quality  that  removes  them 
from  aesthetics  or  contemplation  into  action,  and  that  they  are 
found  more  incorporated  with  the  life  of  the  people  as  a  whole 

15 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

than  any  other  ethical  literature.  And  this  can  only  be  because 
they  find  more  reflection  and  response  in  the  popular  psychol- 
ogy. The  achievements  of  the  Jews  in  many  arts  cannot 
sustain  comparison  with  the  greatest  Gentile  creations.  But  m 
kindliness  the  Jews  stand  unrivalled.  It  is  not  that  they  are  a 
race  of  spiritual  supermen  —  though  they  have  produced  such 
in  Moses,  Jesus  and  Spinoza  —  it  is  merely  that  the  vast 
majority  of  other  stocks  are  —  as  Telemaque  called  the  grand 
conquerors  —  sub-human.     Tennyson   adjured  mankind   to  — 

"  Move  upward,  working  out  the  beast 
And  let  the  ape  and  tiger  die." 

But  the  ape  and  tiger  are  still  terribly  alive,  and  the  tiger  at 
least  is  preferable  in  his  unmixed  animality.  Man  cannot  vie 
with  him  either  in  beauty  or  strength,  and  if  Evolution  having 
got  to  the  ape  can  get  only  to  the  inventor  of  poison-gas  and 
bombs,  one  would  rather  see  the  world  given  over  to  tigers  than 
to  the  half-breed,  homo,  fallen  between  two  planes.  An  intel- 
lectual tiger,  or  an  ape  with  brains,  is  a  very  dreadful  climax 
to  the  process  of  the  suns. 

And  this  ape,  be  it  remembered,  is  one  whose  mouth  spits 
flame,  and  whose  nostrils  snort  chlorine,  who  is  not  debarred 
even  from  wings  of  destruction,  whose  amphibious  maleficence 
can  rend  and  shatter  from  the  very  depths  of  the  sea,  and  a 
touch  of  whose  paw  can  overtopple  towers  and  extinguish  life 
leagues  and  leagues  away. 

"...  A  monster,  then,  a  dream, 
A  discord.     Dragons   of  the  prime, 
That  tare  each  other  in  their  slime, 
Were  mellow  music  match'd  with  him." 

When  Le  Sage  made  his  "  Diable  Boiteux  "  boast  that  he  was 
the  demon  who  among  other  dubious  novelties  had  introduced 
chemistry  into  the  world,  people  must  have  wondered  at  the 
inclusion  in  the  fiend's  catalogue  of  so  apparently  elevated  a 
branch  of  learning.  It  is  now  being  borne  in  on  us  that  chem- 
istry has  been  the  supreme  invention  of  Asmodeus,  though  had 
Le  Sage  been  prophetic  enough  he  would  have  added  every 
department  of  Science,  that  prostitute  of  the  intellect,  who  has 
lent  herself  to  man's  worst  blood-lusts. 

Beginning  with  genuine  horror  at  every  method  of  war  we 

16 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

had  failed  to  anticipate,  we  have  now  slavishly  accepted  every- 
thing, however  ghastly,  as  a  normal  weapon,  and  have  found 
aerial  bombings  in  particular  supplying  a  "  felt  want  "  in  the 
administration  of  over-spacious  savage  territories  by  limited 
forces:  military  authorities,  with  Sir  Henry  Wilson  smiling 
openly  at  our  delusion  that  the  last  was  "  a  war  to  end  war," 
have  even  hinted  that  the  disease-germ  is  no  more  illegitimate 
than  any  other  instrument  of  war,  and  may  be  expected  in  the 
next.  I  recall  that  when  I  was  visiting  the  Pasteur  Institute 
in  Paris,  soon  after  the  American  war  with  Cuba,  a  horrified 
professor  related  to  me  how  a  Cuban  had  applied  to  him  for 
such  a  germ.  But  these  qualms  are  of  the  past.  The  fact  is 
that  civilised  man  at  war  is  worse  than  the  barbarian  —  cor- 
ruptio  optimi  pessima  —  not  merely  because  he  is  so  terribly 
more  efficient,  but  because  his  suddenly  generated  war-mind  is 
morbid  and  unbalanced  in  its  savagery,  in  its  delirium  of  spies 
and  hidden  hands,  compared  with  the  sanity  of  the  fighting 
savage,  who,  his  normal  environment  being  danger  and  his 
normal  atmosphere  war,  is  always  of  the  same  mind,  and  not 
of  two  different  minds  —  the  war-mind  and  the  peace-mind,  wide 
as  the  poles  asunder.  The  civilised  war-mind  is  thus  not 
merely  a  throw-back  to  the  savage  mind,  it  is  a  degeneration 
from  it.  Witness  the  respect  of  the  South  Sea  Islanders  for 
the  enemy's  slumbers,  their  chivalrous  warnings  of  attack,  as 
compared  with  the  unscrupulous  camouflage  of  modern  war,  and 
the  utilisation,  as  I  said,  of  even  Christmas  or  Easter  Day  as 
the  most  unexpected  moment  for  the  offensive.  And  since  we 
are  contrasting  East  with  West,  compare  the  abolition  of 
Sunday  — "  handing  over  the  Lord's  Day  to  the  King  " —  with 
the  proud  clinging  of  the  Pharisees  to  their  Sabbath,  their 
refusal  to  fight  upon  which  lost  them  Jerusalem  on  two  separate 
occasions.  The  "  moratorium  for  Christianity  "  was  defended 
on  the  ground  that  the  war  was  a  Crusade,  and  that  once  the 
Teutonic  Paganism  were  crushed,  everything  would  be  over- 
whelmingly Christian.  But  the  new  world  we  were  promised 
has  turned  out  like  the  new  clothes  of  Hans  Andersen's  nude 
Emperor,  whose  courtiers  were  in  ecstasies  over  his  tailor's 
triumphs.  The  world,  though  the  Supreme  Council,  abetted  by 
the  practical  Briton,  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  still  pretends  that  it 
has  a  League  of  Nations,  has  lost  even  its  last  rags  of  decency, 
and  the  Voice  of  Potsdam  is  blatant  in  every  capital.     Even 

17 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Mr.  Winston  Churchill  confessed  recently  that  "  we  have  been 
transformed  into  a  sphere  which  is  definitely  lower,  from  almost 
every  point  of  view,  than  that  which  we  had  attained  in  the  days 
before  Armageddon." 

This  is  indeed  a  significant  confession  from  one  of  the  pro- 
tagonists of  the  Holy  War.  "  Never,"  he  declares,  "  was  a 
time  when  more  complete  callousness  and  indifference  to  human 
life  and  suffering  was  exhibited  by  the  great  community  all 
over  the  world." 

Mr.  Massingham  in  The  Nation  correctly  describing  Europe 
to-day  as  "  little  more  than  a  prison-house  of  Right,"  proceeds 
to  complain  that  the  Hungarians  in  Transylvania  are  peculiarly 
persecuted  by  the  Roumanians.  "  This  is  the  lot  of  one  of  the 
most  famous  of  European  nationalities  at  the  hands  of  one  of 
the  meanest."  I  have  no  quarrel  with  his  adjectives,  but  the 
outrages  he  cites,  though  monstrous  enough,  are  mild  compared 
with  those  inflicted  by  these  famous  Hungarians  on  the  Jews. 
Mr.  Israel  Cohen,  after  a  special  visit  to  Budapest,  reports  that 
"  Jews  are  dragged  out  of  their  houses,  abused,  flogged,  robbed, 
tortured,  and  deported.  .  .  .  They  are  flogged  naked  until  they 
are  unconscious.  .  .  .  Some  of  the  worst  tortures  have  been 
practised  in  the  Komarom  fortress,  where  men  have  had  to  drink 
the  blood  from  their  own  wounds ;  others  have  been  buried  neck- 
deep  in  the  earth,  and  others  had  to  hold  a  mouse  in  their 
mouth,  or  to  eat  the  hair  pulled  off  their  own  chin."  Never 
was  there  a  Jewry  more  patriotic  than  the  Hungarian,  its  loyal 
striving  to  Magyarise  itself  reached  to  the  absurdity  of  cari- 
cature, and  yet  it  now  finds  itself  repudiated,  harassed,  done  to 
death.  "  The  Danube  bobs  with  Jewish  corpses "  vividly 
observed  to  me  a  friend  who  knows  the  facts. 

But  pogroms  against  the  Jews  have  not  been  confined  to  the 
defeated  countries.  Even  in  victorious  countries  like  Poland 
victory  was  celebrated  with  offerings  of  Jewish  blood,  and  while 
half  the  world  was  dancing  at  the  Armistice,  for  the  Jewish 
people  as  a  wrhole  it  was  the  dance  of  death.  Not  that  the 
Poles  have  proved  as  homicidally  maniacal  as  was  at  first 
feared.  Though  wholesale  massacres  are  preached  by  these 
beggars  on  horseback,  the  Jews  have  as  yet  been  murdered  in 
moderation.  But  they  are  boycotted,  dragooned,  robbed, 
beaten,  and  outlawed,  and  live  in  such  a  state  of  terror  that  the 
British  Sub-Commissioner  to  Poland,  Captain  Peter  Wright, 
says  in  his  official  report :     "  If  I  was  an  Orthodox  Jew,  long- 

18 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

bearded  and  black-coated,  and  found  myself  in  the  same  train 
as  a  party  of  soldiers,  I  should  travel  —  as  even  the  most 
reverend  orthodox  Rabbis  do  —  under  the  seat." 

And  perhaps  even  worse  than  the  dramatic  detonation  of 
persecution,  is  the  unlifting  fog  of  repression,  the  creeping 
terror  of  anticipation.  Such  is  the  situation  in  Poland,  the 
protegee  of  the  Allied  Powers,  anent  which  Sir  Stuart  Samuel, 
the  British  Commissioner,  has  made  a  statement  worthy  of 
Tacitus,  so  pregnant  is  its  summary  of  the  Jewish  situation  in 
many  countries.  "  The  Jewish  soldiers  in  Poland  do  their  duty 
to  their  country  in  the  certainty  that  their  country  will  not  do 
its  duty  by  them."  A  grim  comment  indeed  on  the  vaunted 
chivalry  of  the  Pole.  The  very  funerals  of  distinguished  Polish 
Jews  are  not  safe  from  hooliganism.  Solomon  Asch,  the 
famous  Yiddish  novelist  and  dramatist,  reports  a  statement 
made  to  him  by  the  Rabbi  of  Vilna,  which  is  an  epitome  of 
Jewish  suffering  in  the  Russian  war-zone : 

"  Under  the  old  Russian  Czarist  Government  we  suffered  as  Jews. 
When  the  Germans  occupied  Vilna  we  no  longer  suffered  as  Jews 
but  as  human  beings,  together  with  the  rest  of  the  population,  whom 
they  robbed  of  everything.  Then,  when  the  Bolsheviki  came,  we 
suffered  as  bourgeois.  And  now  that  the  Poles  have  set  foot  in 
Vilna  we  suffer  again  as  Jews.  But  these  sufferings  are  more 
horrible  than  anything  we  have  as  yet  experienced." 

It  is  not,  however,  to  Vilna  but  to  Pinsk  that  attaches  the 
most  monstrous  Polish  misdeed,  though  Captain  Wright 
strangely  thinks  that  Major  C,  its  perpetrator,  would  be 
acquitted  if  brought  to  trial  "  as  being  within  his  strict  rights." 
Heaven  save  us  from  the  military  mind.  It  is  characteristic  of 
Captain  Wright  to  soften  or  explain  away  every  Polish  atroc- 
ity, yet  one  does  not  need  to  travel  beyond  his  own  report  to 
perceive  the  infamousness  of  the  episode.  After  telling  us  that 
the  Zionist  Co-operative  Society  of  Pinsk  had  held  a  legiti- 
matised  meeting  and  that  some  of  the  audience  lingered  chatting 
over  the  distribution  of  a  relief  fund  that  had  come  from 
America,  Captain  Wright  proceeds : 

"  Polish  soldiers  and  a  gendarmerie  who  had  been  pressing  for 
forced  labour,  and  probably  using  this  as  a  blackmailing  pretext, 
entered  the  building  and  arrested  and  searched  those  present.  They 
no  doubt  obtained  a  considerable  amount  of  money  for  themselves  in 
this  search.     Then  they  took  50  or  60  in  number  to  the  headquarters 

19 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

of  Major  C,  and  reported  that  they  had  arrested  the  members  of 
an  unauthorised  Jewish  Bolshevik  meeting.  Major  C,  who  had 
almost  at  the  same  hour  heard  of  a  Bolshevik  success  near  the 
town,  and  was  prepared  to  evacuate  it,  gave  orders  for  their  imme- 
diate execution.  This  was  done  without  trial  of  any  sort  and  even 
without  taking  their  names.  One  person  at  least  of  those  executed 
had  been  swept  into  the  crowd  of  prisoners  by  accident  in  the  street. 
The  whole  incident  only  took  two  or  three  hours.  .  .  .  The  Jewish 
ladies  arrested,  but  exempted  from  the  execution,  were  kept  in 
prison  without  trial  and  enquiry.  They  were  stripped  naked  and 
flogged.  After  the  flogging  they  were  made  to  pass  naked  down  a 
passage  full  of  Polish  soldiers.  The  Jews  arrested,  but  excepted 
from  the  execution,  were  next  day  led  to  the  cemetery  where  those 
executed  were  buried,  and  made  to  dig  their  own  graves,  then,  at 
the  last  moment,  they  were  told  they  were  reprieved ;  in  fact,  the 
gendarmerie  regularly  tormented  the  survivors. 

"  We  were  informed,  but  have  no  exact  information,  that  the  heads 
of  this  gendarmerie  were  subsequently  found  guilty  of  various 
crimes. 

"  The  victims  were  respectable  lower  middle-class  people,  school 
teachers  and  such  like." 

But  as  Sir  Horace  Rumbold,  the  British  Representative  in 
Warsaw,  rightly  objects,  the  Polish- Jewish  atrocities  are  not 
seen  in  their  true  Christian  perspective,  since  the  surrounding 
countries  are  worse: 

"  The  massacres  of  Jews  by  Ukrainian  peasant  bands  can  find,  in 
their  extent  and  thoroughness,  no  parallel  except  in  the  massacres  of 
the  Armenians  in  the  Turkish  Empire.  Their  very  completeness 
has  tended  to  keep  the  world  in  ignorance  of  them,  for  towns  of 
many  inhabitants  almost  wholly  Jewish  have  apparently  been  wiped 
out.  Similar  events  have  taken  place  outside  the  Ukraine  proper; 
and  all  over  Southern  Russia,  such  as  Hungary  and  Czecho- 
slovakia, persecutions  less  sanguinary  perhaps,  but  very  brutal  and 
unj  ust,  have  also  occurred  in  the  interregnum  which  followed  the 
armistice." 

The  butchery  in  the  Ukraine  in  fact  far  exceeds  even  the 
Cossack  horrors  in  Poland  in  the  seventeenth  century,  or  those 
orgies  of  blood  which  marked  the  passage  of  the  Crusaders  of 
1096  through  the  Rhenish  Ghettos,  on  that  journey  to  the 
Tomb  of  Christ  which  culminated  in  1099  in  the  burning  alive 
of  all  the  Jews  of  Jerusalem  in  their  synagogue. 

Vladimir  Tiomkin,  the  head  of  Ukrainian  Jewry,  says  of  one 
among  the  many  bands  of  robbers  and  assassins: 

20 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  The  Jewish  population  was  generally  left  stark  naked,  being 
deprived  even  of  their  shoes  and  underwear.  These  wild  beasts 
would  put  boiling  water  down  the  throats  of  their  victims.  Ears, 
noses,  and  fingers  would  be  cut  off  from  individuals  who  were  fully 
alive.  Often  the  body  would  be  ripped  open  and  the  victims  would 
at  the  same  time  be  made  to  cry :  '  Long  live  free  Ukrainia.'  " 

The  reports  from  the  Ukraine  are  indeed  so  gruesome  that  one 
could  wish  there  was  exaggeration.  Take,  for  example,  the 
story  of  the  pogrom  that  took  place  on  February  14th  in  the 
Government  of  Kieff,  where  a  band  of  fifty  young  girls  was 
given  over  to  a  brutal  soldiery.  Eighty  per  cent,  of  the  popu- 
lation were  killed  or  wounded,  and  their  bodies  thrown  to  the 
swine,  who  were  guarded  in  their  meal  by  an  armed  force.  At 
Filchin  the  orgies  were  beyond  description,  not  a  single  female 
was  left  alive  or  unoutraged,  the  old  men  were  singled  out,  their 
beards  cut  off  and  then  their  heads.  The  Rabbi  gathered  125 
children  of  the  district  and  said  to  the  murderers,  "  You  are 
slaying  the  mothers  and  fathers,  what  shall  we  do  with  the 
children?  "  The  soldiers  made  sport  of  this  appeal  and  then 
deliberately  shot  seventy  of  the  children.  Later,  the  heads  of 
these  innocents,  separated  from  their  bodies,  were  placed  in  a 
huge  barrel  and  sent  as  a  "  present  "  to  the  remaining  members 
of  the  Jewish  community.  The  detail  is  here  too  incredible  to 
be  invented,  and  the  reporter,  Dr.  Bernstein-Kohn,  of  Kishineff, 
is  of  impeccable  authority  and  veracity.  He  tells  us  too  of 
forty  Jews  found  insane  in  a  forest,  walking  on  all  fours. 

If  anybody  imagines  that  this  monstrous  Jew-baiting  is 
merely  one  aspect  of  the  universal  convulsions  of  the  war,  let 
him  turn  back  the  pages  of  history  and  renew  his  memory  of 
the  ghastly  pogroms  of  that  Czarist  Russia  of  which  England 
was  the  political  associate.  Of  the  state  of  terror  in  Warsaw 
in  1906  —  a  state  more  unbearable  even  than  its  actual  atroc- 
ities —  Jacob  Dinesohn,  a  leading  Russo-Jewish  novelist,  who 
died  last  year,  has  —  almost  by  accident  —  provided  a  vivid 
account. 

He  had  received  a  first-class  steamship  ticket  from  the  enter- 
prising Jewish  Daily  News,  of  New  York,  with  the  invitation  to 
use  it.  In  refusing,  this  chivalrous  man  of  letters  gave  as  his 
reason  his  reluctance  to  leave  the  danger-zone  "  of  the  six 
million  Jewish  souls  in  whose  blood  our  red-handed  government 
seems  determined  to  drown  the  revolutionary  activity  in 
Russia." 

21 


THE  VOICE  OP  JEEUSALEM 

"  And  this,"  he  went  on,  "  I  see  day  after  day  with  my  own  eyes, 
and  feel  it  with  all  my  senses.  And  in  this  general  terror,  of  wliat 
account  is  the  individual?  I  feel  myself  merely  a  minute  drop  in 
the  sea  of  blood  and  tears ;  and  my  own  person,  believe  me,  has  lost 
in  my  eyes  its  weight  and  value  above  those  who  are  in  the  same 
danger.  Besides,  one  becomes  accustomed  to  anything;  when  you 
see  death  every  minute  before  your  eyes,  you  cease  to  fear  him  your- 
self, and  are  even  able  to  outstare  him.  A  great  many  of  my 
friends  have  already  been  killed  or  shot  almost  before  my  own  eyes, 
and  they  were  as  innocent  and  harmless  as  can  be  imagined. 

"  It  is  just  Saturday  a  week  ago  that  my  friend,  the  well-known 
writer,  J.  L.  Peretz,  came  near  being  an  innocent  sacrifice  to  the 
times.  At  twelve  o'clock  noon  he  started  to  take  a  walk,  having 
been  confined  to  the  house  for  some  time.  He  had  not  gone  twenty 
paces  from  his  door  when  a  Cossack  of  the  street  patrol  took  the 
fancy  to  discharge  his  gun  behind  his  back.  The  ball  was  so  near 
to  Peretz  that  it  touched  his  cheek,  leaving  a  red  mark,  and  grazed 
his  ear.  The  bullet  that  missed  Peretz  lodged  in  a  fourteen-year- 
old  Jewish  boy  who  was  standing  by  and  crippled  him  for  life;  it 
was  necessary  to  amputate  the  boy's  arm.  Regardless  of  this 
narrow  escape,  Peretz  and  I  took  a  walk  a  few  hours  later  through 
the  same  street  where  we  met  fully  armed  military  guards  who  are 
permitted  to  shoot  or  stab  whomever  they  please  without  any 
responsibility  whatever.  And  this  instance  is  by  no  means  an 
exception;  they  happen  every  day  in  almost  every  street,  especially 
in  the  Jewish  quarter,  and  I  have  neither  heard  nor  read  of  any 
investigation  made  to  determine  whether  the  murder  by  these 
soldiers  is  according  to  law  or  not. 

"  There  are  people  who  tremble  at  the  sight  of  a  raw  recruit,  and 
who  hide  themselves  under  a  feather  bed  at  sight  of  him.  Such 
people  have  our  contemptuous  laughter,  just  as  now  we  laugh  at 
those  who  tremble  to  step  foot  into  the  street  for  fear  of  being  shot 
or  stabbed.  Just  as  a  feather  bed  is  no  protection  against  a  recruit 
with  a  gun  and  bayonet,  so  is  the  policy  of  '  sit  at  home  '  no  guar- 
antee of  safety  from  sudden  and  horrible  death.  The  Jews  in 
Bialystok  met  their  deaths  in  their  homes,  upon  their  roofs  and  in 
their  cellars.  With  us  in  Warsaw,  as  soon  as  there  is  a  talk  of  a 
pogrom  we  are  all  ready  to  die  upon  the  street  rather  than  like  a  rat 
cornered  in  its  hole.  I,  myself,  went  to  the  funeral  of  the  first 
seventy-one  Jews  killed  in  the  Bialystok  pogrom.  Of  the  impres- 
sion the  sight  made  on  me  I  could  not  give  you  an  inkling  even  if  I 
wrote  you  a  hundred  letters.  Again  many  thanks  for  your  kind 
invitation  which  let  me  assure  you  I  fully  appreciate.  But  to  make 
use  of  your  steamship  ticket  is  quite  out  of  the  question.  My  place 
is  here  with  my  people,  come  what  may." 

The  Peretz,  so  nearly  assassinated,  was,  be  it  remarked,  a 

22 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

writer  of  genius,  some  of  whose  tales  have  the  charm  of  Hans 
Andersen. 

Note  that  it  is  not  Poles  murdering  Jews  on  national  or 
Bolshevist  pretexts,  but  Cossacks  inspired  by  that  bureaucracy 
with  which  Bolshevism  is  now  so  unfavourably  contrasted. 

"  Thut  nichts !  der  Jude  wird  verbrannt." 

Alas !  the  words  that  Lessing  put  into  the  mouth  of  the  perti- 
nacious Patriarch  of  Jerusalem  amount  to  a  law  of  history. 

Mrs.  Despard,  returning  from  Budapest,  relates,  among 
cruder  horrors,  the  story  of  a  beautiful  boy  of  twelve  who  was 
flogged  for  refusing  to  spit  upon  the  portrait  of  his  father,  a 
Jewish  teacher.     "  My  father  is  a  saint,"  said  the  boy  proudly. 

The  Jews  are  not  all  saints,  but  what  a  set  of  savages,  these 
Gentile  peoples,  glorified  by  the  professors  of  nationalism,  some 
even  enriched  with  new  dominions  and  power  by  the  Supreme 
Council,  whose  Minority  Treaty  they  flout  as  shamelessly  as  the 
Supreme  Council  itself  flouts  the  League  of  Nations.  However 
they  may  harry  one  another's  minorities,  they  are  at  one  in  har- 
rying the  Jew ! 

Were  not  "  Mandates  "  already  grown  farcical,  one  would 
suggest  that  all  these  barbarian  peoples,  so  far  from  enjoying 
the  "  sovereign  rights  "  which  they  feel  attainted  even  by  the 
Minority  Treaty,  should  be  put  completely  under  ward  and 
watch  till  they  become  civilised.  But  quis  cwstodiat  custodes? 
Indeed  all  Europe  should  be  put  under  a  "  Mandate,"  and  I 
know  only  one  people  civilised  enough  to  exercise  it.  Mean- 
time, over  half  that  Christian  continent,  the  voice  of  Jeru- 
salem is  only  a  cry  in  the  night ! 

While  Christian  history  with  its  countless  blood-spillings  and 
mutual  burnings,  that  are  a  constituent  even  of  its  religious 
record,  is  almost  insufferable  in  the  reading  to  any  man  of  sym- 
pathy or  imagination,  it  is  impossible,  despite  the  sordid  stains 
as  upon  old  clo',  to  read  Jewish  history  since  the  fall  of  Jeru- 
salem without  being  purged  by  pity  and  terror.  For  here  no 
blood  is  shed  but  that  of  Israel,  and  if  the  epic  is  defaced  by 
meanness  and  squalor,  and  if  the  tragedy  comes  not  seldom 
from  a  betrayal  by  what  is  false  within,  there  remains  enough  to 
make  it  an  eternal  epic  of  the  triumph  of  the  spirit.  Indeed, 
does  not  even  Hegel  call  the  Jews  the  people  of  the  spirit? 

To  interpret  this  voice  of  Jerusalem  and  the  people  that  is 
still  its  natural  organ,  is  the  purpose  of  these  essays.     I  have 

23 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

not  sought  to  probe  into  the  absolute  philosophical  and  theo- 
logical significance  of  the  phenomena  under  investigation. 
That  would  require  another  and  a  different  book.  It  is  the 
phenomena  themselves  that  have  first  to  be  admitted,  to  be  dis- 
engaged from  their  fabular  presentation  and  scoured  of  the 
prejudice  that  obscures  them. 

The  Jewish  Viennese  anthropologist,  Ignaz  Zollschan,  chal- 
lenging with  his  book,  "  Das  Rassenproblem,"  the  famous  thesis 
of  Houston  Chamberlain  and  his  disciples  that  civilisation  is  a 
creation  of  the  Germanic  race  and  that  the  Jew  is  an  inferior 
breed  (Jesus  being  a  German  of  Rhenish-Westphalian  origin), 
yet  remarks  at  the  end  of  his  brilliant  work  that  his  vindication 
of  his  race  has  only  the  value  of  an  epitaph,  since  unless  a  terri- 
tory can  be  found  for  them,  the  Jews  are  destined  to  disappear: 
nevertheless  he  had  felt  it  his  duty  in  the  interests  of  scientific 
decency  to  publish  the  results  of  his  investigation. 

I  do  not  share  —  as  will  be  seen  from  my  analysis  in  "  The 
Territorial  Solution  of  the  Jewish  Question  " —  this  conclusion 
as  to  the  imminence  or  even  the  possibility  of  Judaism  and  the 
Jew  disappearing,  but  I  am  at  one  with  Dr.  Zollschan  in  desir- 
ing that  the  subject  of  Jews  and  Judaism  shall  be  lifted  out  of 
the  mist  of  ignorance  and  bigotry  into  the  clear  light  of  knowl- 
edge. 

IV 

Hardly  had  I  written  these  words  when  an  American  visitor 
brought  me  a  work  hitherto  unknown  to  me  called  "  The  Jewish 
Spectre,"  published  in  New  York  in  1905  by  Mr.  George  H. 
Warner,  and  making  exactly  this  demand.  Despite  its  cine- 
matographic title,  it  seems  a  fascinating  and,  for  the  most  part, 
competent  piece  of  literary  and  historical  criticism,  rather  flip- 
pant in  tone,  but  of  obvious  value  in  helping  to  depolarize  the 
Bible  and  the  Jew  for  the  uninformed  mind,  and  to  bring  both 
within  the  natural  categories  of  life  and  literature.  Mr.  War- 
ner will  have  none  of  that  unnatural  halo  that  clings  to  Pales- 
tine, he  cannot  away  with  the  Brocken  figure  which  looms  before 
mankind  as  the  ancient  Hebrew,  nor  with  that  fantastic  or  sinis- 
ter blurring,  which  makes  even  the  contemporary  Jew  spectral. 
In  clearing  away  the  grotesqueries  of  Sue  and  Dore,  Shake- 
speare and  Marlowe,  Disraeli  and  Dickens,  and  the  popular 
press,  in  applying  the  besom  of  common  sense  to  all  these  wan- 
dering Jews,  usurious  fiends,  mysterious  millionaires,  press-mo- 

24 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

nopolists,  and  universal  wire-pullers,  in  sweeping  away  all  this 
galimatias  of  superstition  and  pseudo-romance  and  legendary 
fear,  and  in  replacing  the  visionary  and  the  fantastic  by  histor- 
ical and  biological  intelligibilities ;  in  short,  in  exorcising  "  The 
Jewish  Spectre,"  and  substituting  the  Jew  of  flesh  and  blood, 
even  in  ancient  Palestine  or  Babylonia,  Mr.  Warner  has  done 
good  scientific  work.  Unfortunately,  he  has  not  done  it  in  a 
scientific  spirit,  but  with  a  touch  of  anti-Semitism  and  icono- 
clasm  which  precipitates  him  into  the  opposite  extreme  and  into 
an  equally  unmerited  denigration  of  Jew  and  Judaism.  In- 
stead of  getting  them  into  a  true  world-perspective  he  pushes 
them  out  of  it  again.  "  The  Jew,"  he  says  in  his  vivid  way, 
"  must  take  his  place  in  the  scales  and  be  weighed  with  the  law's 
inexorable,  sealed  and  certified  weights,  as  other  men  are." 
With  all  my  heart.  Only  a  legal  balance  is  exactly  what  our 
author  lacks.  At  times  he  writes  like  those  shallow  radicals 
who  can  see  nothing  mysterious  in  the  real,  and  who  believe  that 
when  you  have  stripped  away  the  false  romance  from  a  phe- 
nomenon, the  phenomenon  remains  invariably  prosaic.  Seeley, 
in  his  brilliant  study  of  "  The  Expansion  of  England,"  divests 
the  Englishman  of  any  peculiar  genius  for  the  sea  or  any  im- 
perial instinct,  and  shows  to  what  simple  factors  even  the  con- 
quest of  India  was  due.  Yet  with  every  separate  miracle  ex- 
plained away,  the  total  miracle  of  the  British  Empire  remains, 
the  wonder  of  a  small  island  holding  a  fourth  of  the  globe.  So, 
too,  when  one  has  denuded  Jewish  history  and  literature  of 
every  shred  of  supernaturalism  and  every  hull  of  romantic  fan- 
tasy, the  invincible  race  and  faith  remain  like  a  Doric  temple  on 
a  headland,  the  sublimer  for  the  bareness.  For  there  is  a  true 
romance  as  well  as  a  false,  and  when  you  have  laid  the  Jewish 
Spectre  you  are  confronted  by  the  Jewish  Spirit. 

Consider  the  "  outline  "  of  this  history.  A  shepherd,  born 
in  Mesopotamia,  roved  to  Palestine,  and  his  descendants,  after  a 
period  of  slavery  in  Egypt,  returned  to  Palestine  as  conquerors 
and  agriculturists,  there  to  practise  the  theocratic  code  im- 
posed by  their  leader,  Moses  (perhaps  the  noblest  figure  in  all 
history),  and  to  evolve  in  the  course  of  the  ages  a  poetic  and 
prophetic  literature  of  unparalleled  sublimity.  That  union  of 
spirituality,  intellectuality  and  fighting  power  in  the  breed, 
which  raised  it  above  all  ancient  races  except  the  Greek,  was 
paid  for  by  an  excessive  individualism  which  distracted  and  di- 
vided the  State.     Palestine  fell  before  the  legions  of  Titus. 

25 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

But  two  generations  later  her  final  bid  for  independence  was  so 
fierce  that  Hadrian  was  forced  to  recall  his  ablest  general  — 
Severus  —  from  the  less  formidable  task  of  subduing  Britain, 
equally  in  revolt.  Half  a  century  before  it  challenged  Rome, 
the  Jewish  State  had  produced  Christianity  and  had  thus,  un- 
known to  itself,  entered  on  a  greater  career  of  world-conquest 
than  any  victory  over  Rome  could  have  brought  it.  And  five 
centuries  after  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem,  its  wandering 
scions  had  impregnated  Muhammad  with  the  ideas  of  Islam. 
Half  the  world  was  thus  won  for  Hebraism  in  outer  form  at 
least,  and  Disraeli  could  boast  that  Europe  was  divided  between 
those  who  worshipped  a  Jew  and  those  who  worshipped  a  Jew- 
ess. The  question  is  sometimes  raised  whether  Jews  are  Euro- 
peans.     They  are  more,  for  they  have  helped  to  make  Europe. 

A  nucleus  of  the  race,  however,  still  persisted,  partly  by  na- 
tionalist instinct,  partly  by  the  faith  that  its  doctrines  had  been 
adulterated  by  illegitimate  elements  and  its  mission  was  still  un- 
accomplished, and  to-day  as  a  population  of  some  fourteen  or 
fifteen  millions  constitutes  a  Jewdom  larger  than  any  that  its 
ancient  conquerors  had  ever  boasted  of  crushing;  so  large  in- 
deed that  though  after  1,850  years  a  prospect  has  opened  out 
of  re-establishing  its  old  national  home,  for  it  to  re-occupy  its 
ancient  shell  save  through  a  representative  minority,  is  phys- 
ically impossible. 

Is  there  no  romance  here?  Even  the  false-romantic  of  the 
Wandering  Jew  has  a  core  of  truth,  of  that  legendary  presenta- 
tion which  is  often  truer  than  a  string  of  facts,  but  to  which 
Mr.  Warner  turns  a  colour-blind  eye.  He  makes  great  play 
with  the  exaggerated  grandeur  of  Solomon's  Palace  — "  about 
as  large  as  a  country  house  at  Lenox  "  he  calculates.  Oddly 
enough,  Mr.  Wells  in  "  The  Outline  of  History  "  applies  the 
same  foot-measure  to  Solomon's  Temple  — "  the  breadth  of  a 
small  villa  residence."  Compared  with  the  buildings  of  Phar- 
aoh or  Sardanapalus  it  was  trivial.  As  though  the  pilgrim  to 
Little  Easton  should  compare  the  dimensions  of  Easton  Rec- 
tory —  the  shrine  of  Mr.  Wells's  genius  —  with  those  of  Eas- 
ton Lodge,  the  home  of  the  Earl  of  Warwick !  Not  in  the  ar- 
chitecture of  Solomon's  temple  lay  the  Jew's  contribution  to 
civilization  but  in  its  dedication  to  the  worship  of  all  mankind, 
and  in  the  sacred  tradition  that  the  privilege  of  building  it  had 
been  disallowed  to  David  because  he  was  a  man  of  war  and 

had  shed  blood. 

26 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Mr.  Warner  sneers  at  the  Ghetto  and  the  fuss  made  about  it 
in  modern  literature.  Well,  what  was  the  Ghetto?  The  ety- 
mology of  the  word  remains  obscure,  though  the  word  itself  still 
denotes  the  quarter  of  Venice,  the  few  back-canals,  where  the 
Jews  once  lived  by  law  and  where  a  number  still  live  by  habit, 
among  synagogues  more  numerous  even  than  public-houses  in 
Britain.  The  sacrifice  of  so  much  space  to  God  was  the  more 
remarkable,  inasmuch  as  congestion  was  the  natural  character- 
istic of  a  Ghetto,  where  births  multiply  and  boundaries  remain 
fixed.  It  was  through  this  pressure  on  space  that  the  sky- 
scraper arose  in  the  city  of  the  Doges  before  New  York  was 
invented.  Not  that  the  Italian  altitude  can  vie  with  the  Amer- 
ican—  how  indeed,  shall  America  be  out-topped?  —  but  there 
were  certainly  in  all  Italy  no  other  houses  seven  storeys  high. 
Congestion  was  the  characteristic  even  of  the  Ghetto  grave- 
yard, as  is  still  to  be  seen  at  Prague,  where  the  tragic  huddle 
of  countless  gravestones  in  every  stage  of  decrepitude  and  de- 
facement and  at  every  angle  of  declension,  almost  suggests  a 
struggle  for  death,  for  a  place  not  in  the  sun  but  in  the  earth. 
"  May  he  come  to  his  place  in  peace,"  is  the  mystic  formula 
pronounced  as  the  clods  rattle  on  the  Jewish  coffin.  There 
were  few  places  for  the  Jew  to  come  to  in  peace,  whether  on  the 
earth  or  beneath  it,  for  in  the  very  heart  of  Christian  civiliza- 
tion he  dared  to  go  unarmed,  and  the  history  of  the  Ghetto  is 
from  more  than  one  aspect  the  story  of  the  longest  and  brave- 
est  experiment  that  has  ever  been  made  in  practical  Christian- 
ity. Over  nearly  eighteen  centuries  the  experiment  has  been 
tried,  and  a  scientific  study  of  the  results  would  be  an  illuminat- 
ing contribution  to  history,  religion,  and  ethics. 

For  whatever  disintegrations,  aberrations  and  confusions 
challenge  the  observer  and  the  critic  to-day  —  whatever  super- 
stitions and  fanaticisms  defaced  the  ages  of  belief  —  the 
centre  of  the  Ghetto  was  God,  and  the  distinction  between 
the  layman  and  the  "  man  of  God  "  did  not  exist,  the  Rabbi 
being  only  a  professor  of  holy  lore,  this  title  meaning 
merely  "  My  Master."  The  Ghetto,  through  whatever  mists  of 
legend  and  broidered  veils  of  fantasy,  looked  back  to  Sinai  and 
forward  to  the  Millennium,  to  the  day  when  ten  men  of  all  na- 
tions should  take  hold  of  the  skirt  of  a  Jew,  saying  we  will  go 
with  you,  for  we  have  heard  that  God  is  with  you.  In  that 
day  the  Lord  should  be  One  and  His  Name  One;  men  would 
beat   their   swords   into  ploughshares,   and   their   spears   into 

27 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

pruning-hooks,  nation  should  not  lift  up  sword  against  na- 
tion, neither  should  they  learn  war  any  more.  Living  through 
the  "  drums  and  tramplings  "  of  the  Roman  Empire,  of  the 
Dark  Ages,  of  the  Middle  Ages,  of  the  Crusades,  of  the  Na- 
poleonic wars,  as  he  had  outlived  the  military  Empires  of 
Assyria,  Babylon,  Persia  and  Greece,  the  Jew  still  clung  to  this, 
his  national  vision. 

Well  might  Charles  Lamb  say  the  Jew  was  "  a  piece  of  stub- 
born antiquity  compared  to  which  Stonchenge  was  in  its  non- 
age." The  Ghetto  was  not  only  a  piece  of  antiquity,  but  of 
Oriental  antiquity,  petrified  for  the  most  part  in  the  West.  Its 
spiritual  latitude  was  that  of  Zion,  it  took  its  time  from  Jeru- 
salem and  its  seasons  and  celebrations  from  Palestine.  Geo- 
graphically it  was  everywhere  and  anywhere,  but  its  inhabitants 
were  at  home  nowhere,  not  even  in  Palestine,  under  the  dead 
hand  of  the  Turk.  In  this  homeless  home  of  the  Ghetto  dwelt 
—  one  dare  not  say  abode,  for  the  Wandering  Jew  is  even  to- 
day working  out  his  doom  —  the  race  that  supplied  Christen- 
dom and  Islam  with  their  religions,  European  art  with  its  sub- 
jects, Western  oratory  with  its  phrases  and  images,  Socialism 
with  its  ideas  and  America  with  its  Puritan  foundations.  Ven- 
ice herself  rested  almost  as  largely  on  the  Ghetto  as  on  her 
humble  hidden  wooden  piles. 

It  may  seem  a  far  cry  from  these  Pisgah-hcights  to  Mr. 
Potash  and  Mr.  Perlmuttcr  or  the  more  clayey  and  earthbound 
of  the  Ghetto's  denizens.  But  then  "  the  soul  of  a  people  " 
does  not  inform  equally  all  its  bodies,  nor  is  the  sky-scraper  all 
heaven-kissing  roof-garden.  There  are  the  lower  storeys,  the 
basements,  and  even  the  cellars,  full  of  the  homely,  kindly  life 
of  earth  and  not  devoid  of  its  grossness  and  ugliness.  And 
thus  it  was  that  this  paradoxical  people,  omnipresent,  yet  ever 
in  a  minority,  everywhere  powerful,  yet  everywhere  oppressed 
or  abused,  offered  to  the  seeing  eye  such  boundless  aspects  of  ro- 
mance and  tragedy,  so  many  facets  of  sublimity  or  grotesquerie. 
An  infinite  irony  clung  round  its  very  existence.  And  this 
existence  was  preserved  by  faith  and  cunning,  by  the  spirit  and 
the  gold-piece,  by  humour  and  by  lack  of  humour,  by  tolerance 
and  by  persecution,  by  a  poetic  and  hygienic  tradition,  and  by 
that  desperate  will-to-live  already  noted  by  the  midwivea  of 
Pharaoh;  a  will-to-live  which  still  subtly  animates  not  a  few 
"  Zionists,"  devoid  of  religion  and  distant  from  Zion. 

Possibly,  acquaintance  with  the  Ghetto  inspired  the  philos- 

28 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ophy  of  Durkheim  —  himself  one  of  its  children  and  even  the 
son  of  a  Rabbi  —  and  there  is  no  doubt  that  it  is  a  striking 
illustration  of  the  value  of  the  clan. 

In  the  year  before  the  war,  feverishly  seeking  and  ensuing  the 
wisdom  of  the  Webbs,  panting  to  learn  from  their  new  states- 
manship how  to  rebuild  the  social  order,  I  was  brought  up  al- 
most at  the  exordium  by  these  amazing  sentences :  "  What 
modern  industrialism  generation  after  generation  destroys  is 
the  soul  of  the  people.  .  .  .  Breathing  from  infancy  up  an  at- 
mosphere of  morbid  alcoholism  and  sexuality,  furtive  larceny, 
and  unashamed  mendacity  —  though  here  and  there  a  moral 
genius  may  survive,  saddened  but  unscathed  —  the  average 
man  is  morally,  as  well  as  physically,  poisoned.  The  destitu- 
tion against  which  we  protest  is  thus  a  degradation  of  char- 
acter, a  spiritual  demoralisation,  a  destruction  of  human  per- 
sonality itself." 

And  this  destitution,  it  appeared,  was  not  that  of  "  the  sub- 
merged tenth,"  but  the  comparatively  secure  existence  in  the 
slums  of  great  cities,  "  life  on  a  pound  a  week." 

Now,  having  known  intimately  many  Jewish  households  in 
the  slums  on  a  pound  a  week  or  less,  and  in  no  instance  seen 
personality  destroyed  or  degraded,  but  in  numberless  instances 
accentuated  and  uplifted,  I  was  driven  to  the  alternative  that 
either  the  Webbs  knew  nothing  of  life,  or  that  life  in  the  Ghetto 
differs,  toto  ccelo,  from  that  familiar  to  the  Christian  sociolo- 
gist. In  favour  of  the  latter  hypothesis,  I  recall  an  appalling 
appeal  I  recently  received  from  some  East-end  Mission,  paint- 
ing the  region  it  served  as  a  bestial  netherworld,  without  even 
the  physical  health  of  the  jungle.  That  the  Mission  remained 
nevertheless  eager  to  convert  the  few  Jews  of  the  district  is  one 
of  the  grim  ironies  of  the  situation. 

If,  then,  the  Webb  picture  of  British  slum-life  is  accurate,  it 
would  seem  clear  that,  as  a  religion  for  the  people,  Judaism 
pans  out  far  more  practically  than  Christianity.  Or  will  it  be 
claimed  that  the  households  so  luridly  described  have  no  relig- 
ion? In  that  case,  since  there  is  a  deficiency  other  than  ma- 
terial destitution,  is  not  the  wisdom  of  the  Webbs  tainted  after 
all  with  the  materialism  it  repudiates,  if  it  seeks,  as  it  does, 
to  put  all  the  blame  upon  poverty?  Nay;  since  there  is  not 
only  deficiency  but  surplusage  — "  morbid  alcoholism  " —  is  it 
really  scientific  to  lump  all  the  evils  of  the  social  order  on  the 
unequal  distribution  of  wealth?     The  temperance  of  the  Ghetto 

29 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

is  alone  sufficient  to  account  for  its  superiority  to  the  sodden 
streets  around  it.  But  this  would  be  only  a  negative  virtue. 
It  is  on  positive  conceptions  that  the  Ghetto  rises  from  the 
social  swamps  around,  as  Venice  from  its  malarious  marsh. 
Living  "  in  all  the  ugliness,  the  dirt  and  disorder  of  the  mean 
streets,"  the  poor  Jew  nevertheless  contrives  to  surround  him- 
self with  ancient  visions  and  prophetic  splendours,  which  en- 
tirely blot  out  these  streets  as  the  actual  mud  of  the  gutter- 
snipe's nursery  is  blotted  out  in  some  transfiguring  vision  of 
the  castle  he  is  shaping.  That  the  true-born  Englishman, 
scion  of  the  greatest  Empire  the  world  has  ever  seen,  should 
have  for  compensation  in  his  poverty  less  sense  of  the  great- 
ness of  his  heritage  and  of  his  breed  than  the  humble  Jew  who 
owns  nationally  no  square  incli  of  the  earth's  surface,  is  a 
paradox  that  has  already  suggested  to  Dr.  Stanton  C'oit  the 
making  of  a  national  English  religion  on  the  lines  of  the  Jewish. 
Moreover,  "  all  Israel  are  brethren  and  much  of  that  communal- 
ised  social  conception  which  the  Webbs  are  groaning  and  tra- 
vailing to  impart  to  the  West  existed  three  thousand  years  ago 
in  the  Mosaic  Code,  even  to  land  nationalisation.  It  is  not 
because  property  is  unequally  distributed,  not  even  because  in- 
dividualism has  its  horrors,  that  Bolshevism  has  come  upon  us. 
It  is  because  for  lack  of  vision  or  for  overplus  of  false  vision 
the  peoples  have  been  allowed  to  perish.  The  panacea  for  all 
social  evils  has  been  sought  in  material  factors  by  a  leadership 
devoid  of  insight  into  psychological  relativity,  and  with  in- 
sufficient imagination  to  foresee  the  new  evils  that  Socialism 
would  substitute  for  the  old,  were  its  raging,  tearing,  and  only 
half-truthful  campaign  successful.  Labour,  as  John  Stuart 
Mill  told  it  to  its  face,  is  often  mendacious.  It  is  also  not 
seldom  slack  and  inefficient,  apart  from  intoxicated,  and  by  its 
piecemeal  strikes  in  which  the  classes  with  an  immediate  pull, 
such  as  railwaymen  and  miners,  extract  wages  beyond  those  of 
non-pivotal  workers,  it  shows  itself  no  less  selfish  than  capital- 
ism. "  My  class,  right  or  wrong,"  cries  Mr.  Robert  Williams, 
assuming  an  even  lower  moral  standpoint  than  the  man  who 
cries,  "  My  country,  right  or  wrong."  But  Labour,  we  see, 
is  not  even  loyal  to  its  class. 


Far  more  pregnant  than  all  the  learned  scribblings  about 
Judaism  is  the  reply  of  the  German  conscript,  who,  being  asked 

SO 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

what  his  religion  was,  replied  in  astonishment:     "  Wir  haben 
keine  Religion.     Wir  sind  doch  Juden."     The  worthy  Israelite 
was  not  even  aware  he  had  a  religion :  he  was  a  Jew.     And  this 
equivalence  of  Judaism  and  life  is  a  central  characteristic  of 
the  religion.     It  led  necessarily  to  religion  pervading  the  home, 
to  a  domestic  ritual,  with  the  father  for  priest  and  the  mother 
to  bless  the  Sabbath  candles.     And  if,  as  Fustel  de  Coulanges 
shows  in  "La  Cite  Antique,"  this  feature  (minus  the  woman's 
role)  was  common  also  to  the  Greek,  the  Roman,  and  the  an- 
cient Hindu  religion,  peculiar  to  the  "  peculiar  people  "  was 
the  elaborate  dietary,  sanitary,  and  sex-regulative  side  of  the 
religion  —  the  glorified  and  sanctified  sociology,  under  which 
even  the  most  phylacteried  Pharisee  could  not  escape  being  a 
decent  citizen.     He  might  lack  the  spiritual  poetry  of  a  St. 
Francis,  but  at  any  rate  he  was  more  exploited  by  the  spirit 
than  exploiting  it.     He  might  not  love  so  romantically  as  an 
Amadis  de  Gaul,  but  he  transmitted  an  untainted  physical  her- 
itage.    The  results  may  be  read  in  the  bio-statistics  of  the  race. 
Under  the  Lloyd  George  Insurance  System,  three  and  a  half 
times  as  much  is  paid  out  in  sick  benefit  funds  by  the  Pruden- 
tial as  by  a  Jewish  society  in  the  East-end.     In  the  Russian 
Pale,  with  all  its  persecution,  the  death-rate  was  only  half  that 
of  Christian  Russia,  and  the  proportion  of  talent  immeasur- 
ably larger.      Thus,  over  some  thirty-two  centuries  and  in  al- 
most every  environment  on  earth,  a  vast  eugenic  experiment  has 
been  in  process,  as  well  as  a  Christian.     But  science  has  only 
just  awakened  to  this  importance  of  the  Ghetto  as  an  experi- 
ment in  sociology.     The  secret  of  Jewish  longevity,  of  Jewish 
immunity  from  certain  diseases,  is  at  last  being  sought.     One 
of  the  greatest  practical  authorities   on  medicine,   Sir  James 
Cantlie,  is  reported  as  testifying  that  we  have  never  upset  one 
of  Moses's  laws  in  regard  to  hygiene,  sanitation  or  medical  sci- 
ence, that  all  that  the  scientists  of  to-day,  with  their  micro- 
scopes and  text-books,  did  was  to  prove  that  the  ancient  Law- 
giver was  right,  and  that  we  had  been  trying  hitherto  to  cure 
disease  instead  of  preventing  it  as  Moses  did.     To  the  same 
effect  is  a  work  entitled  "  Moses,  the  Founder  of  Preventive 
Medicine,"   by   Captain   Percival  Wood,   M.R.C.S.,  L.R.C.P., 
a  doctor  returned  from  fighting  disease  at  the  front,  where  he 
discovered  the  hygienic  value  of  the  Mosaic  Code.      Now,  too, 
at  last  the  marriage  laws  of  Leviticus  and  the  Talmudical  Trac- 
tate that  amplifies  them  are  being  studied  —  with  admiration 

31 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

for  a  code  that  could  interfere  even  between  Beauty  and  the 
Beast.  There  is  here  a  vast  new  field  for  research  which  has 
barely  been  touched.  It  may  well  be  that  the  Mosaic  regimen 
was  physiologically  beneficial,  contributing  to  the  longevity  of 
the  race  and  to  its  joie  de  vivre  in  the  teeth  of  unpromising  cir- 
cumstances. On  the  side  issue  of  miscegenation  valuable  work 
on  Mendelian  lines  has  been  done  by  Dr.  RedclifFe  Salaman, 
who  finds  the  Jew  physiologically  recessive,  as  he  certainly  is 
psychologically  in  a  fusion  of  cultures.  Circumcision  seems 
now  a  recognised  prophylactic.  But  we  have  no  studies  on  the 
value  of  the  dietary  code,  as  to  whether  for  example  there  is 
any  point  in  the  prohibition  of  pork  outside  a  sub-tropical 
country  like  Palestine.  Dr.  James  Braithwaite  has  attributed 
to  its  absence  from  the  dietary  the  comparative  immunity  of 
Jewesses  from  cancer  of  the  uterus,  but  this  appears  to  be  a 
mere  conjecture,  based  on  the  negative  argument  that  there  is 
no  other  apparent  factor  of  difference.  There  is  more  sub- 
stance in  the  general  recognition  of  the  sobriety  of  the  Jewish 
husband  and  the  solicitude  of  the  Jewish  mother  as  the  keys  to 
the  superior  stamina  and  lower  death-rate  of  the  Jewish  child. 
When  Mr.  William  Hall,  of  Leeds,  made  a  comparison  between 
the  Jewish  children  of  the  poorest  district  in  Leeds  and  the  Gen- 
tile children  of  the  same  quarter,  so  that  the  bad  circumstances 
they  have  in  common,  viz.,  dirt,  overcrowding,  and  city  atmos- 
phere were  eliminated,  and  parental  care  remained  the  only  dis- 
tinction, it  was  found  that,  while  the  average  Christian  child  of 
seven  weighed  45  lbs.  the  Jewish  child  weighed  49  lbs.,  though 
the  average  Christian  child  of  the  English-speaking  race,  rich 
and  poor  alike,  weighed  only  48  lbs.  That  is,  at  seven  the  Jew- 
ish slum  child  weighs  more  than  the  average  Christian  child, 
even  including  the  richest  classes.  At  the  age  of  twelve  the  av- 
erage Christian  child,  rich  and  poor  taken  together,  slightly  ex- 
ceeds in  weight  the  Jewish  slum  child.  Possibly  because  many 
inferior  Christian  specimens  have  been  killed  off.  This  child 
now  weighs  77  lbs.  against  the  Jewish  slum  child's  76  lbs.  But 
if  the  Jewish  slum  child  of  twelve  weighs  76'  lbs.,  what  does  the 
Christian  slum  child  weigh  at  that  age?  Only  53%  lbs.  Sim- 
ilarly, as  to  height,  the  Jewish  slum  child  of  eight  to  twelve  is 
about  two  inches  taller  than  the  Christian  slum  child,  and  al- 
most as  tall  as  the  average  Christian  child.  In  the  Gentile 
schools  of  Leeds  there  were  60  per  cent,  of  bad  teeth,  in  the 

32 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Jewish  schools  25  per  cent.     But  the  most  extraordinary  dif- 
ference occurs  in  the  case  of  rickets. 

In  the  Jewish  schools  of  Leeds  there  was  7  per  cent,  of  rick- 
ets ;  in  the  Gentile  schools  50  per  cent.,  i.  e.,  one  child  out  of 
every  two  was  a  sufferer.  This  bony  deterioration  is  intimately 
connected  with  the  insufficient  supply  of  organic  phosphate  of 
lime  in  the  infant's  milk.  It  is  said  that  only  10  per  cent,  of 
Gentile  mothers  nurse  their  children  at  the  breast,  as  against 
90  per  cent,  of  the  Jews,  the  result  being  that  while  in  Manches- 
ter in  1901,  118  Jewish  infants  died  under  one  year  old  out  of 
1,000,  the  number  of  Gentile  innocents  to  be  massacred  was  300. 
Besides  the  superior  feeding  of  the  Jewish  child  we  must  take 
into  account  too  probably  the  lesser  drinking  of  the  mother. 
We  should  also  add  the  ignorant  and  cruel  state  of  public  opin- 
ion, which  up  till  the  other  day  permitted  women  who  were 
about  to  become  mothers  or  who  had  just  become  mothers  to 
work  in  factories.  Drink  and  venereal  disease  are  still  busily 
engaged  in  turning  out  distorted  specimens  faster  than  Chris- 
tendom can  set  them  straight  again. 

But  this  psychological  superiority  of  the  Ghetto  with  its 
physiological  pendant  was  not  achieved  by  a  cold  eugenic  sys- 
tem. Captain  Peter  Wright  has  told  us  how  a  Polish  Jew  was 
badly  mishandled  by  soldiers  rather  than  let  them  force  a  piece 
of  meat  that  was  not  hasher  through  his  teeth;  while  another 
was  cruelly  beaten  rather  than  sign  his  name  on  Saturday. 
One  can  scarcely  imagine  such  obedience  being  rendered  to  a 
merely  legal  code.  But  sociology  was  transfigured  into  poetry, 
the  professor  was  disguised  as  the  prophet,  and  the  driving- 
force  found  in  the  love  or  the  fear  of  God.  Kuno  Fischer 
called  Germany  the  Ego  among  the  nations  (meaning  the  self- 
conscious  philosopher),  but  Jehuda  Halevi  called  Israel  the 
heart  among  the  nations.  Philosophy  was  always  alien  to  the 
Hebrew  temper,  which,  having  a  God,  had  no  need  of  meta- 
physics. The  only  philosophy  Israel  needed  was  a  philosophy 
of  history,  and  its  epic  is  the  salvation  of  the  world  by  a  people 
chosen  for  service  and  suffering.  This  history  and  this  philos- 
ophy, woven  into  the  daily  round  by  festivals  and  commemora- 
tions as  into  the  physical  life  by  prescriptions  and  by  prohibi- 
tions, have  kept  alive  through  vicissitudes  and  perils  innumer- 
able a  people  which  had  apparently  exhausted  and  fulfilled  itself 
in  producing  Christianity  in  Palestine. 

S3 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

It  was  the  genius  of  Judaism  to  have  fused  science  and  life 
in  the  glow  of  religion,  and  to  secure  obedience  by  the  poetic 
concept  of  a  tender  intimacy  between  a  divine  legislator  and  a 
people  chosen  to  exhibit  to  the  world  the  pragmatic  value  of 
His  laws.  "With  everlasting  love  hast  Thou  loved  the  house 
of  Israel,  Thy  people ;  a  Law  and  commandments,  statutes  and 
judgments,  hast  Thou  taught  us.  .  .  .  Blessed  art  Thou,  O 
Lord,  who  lovest  Thy  people  Israel."  Such  is  the  sentiment 
translated  into  impassioned  images  by  Amos  in  the  eighth  cen- 
tury b.c,  and  such  is  the  evening  benediction  still  uttered  to- 
day by  millions  of  Hebrew  lips. 

A  "  chosen  people  "  is  at  bottom  —  as  I  have  pointed  out  in 
my  little  book  on  the  subject  —  only  a  choosing  people.  And 
the  performance  of  this  Law  and  these  commandments,  statutes 
and  judgments,  covering  as  they  did  the  whole  of  life,  produced 
—  despite  the  tendency  of  all  law  to  over-formality  —  a  do- 
mestic ritual  of  singular  beauty  and  poetry  and  tender  and  self- 
controlling  traits  of  character.  No  demos  in  the  world  is  so 
saturated  with  idealism  and  domestic  virtue,  and  when,  even 
apart  from  its  bio-statistics,  it  is  compared  with  the  yet  un- 
civilized and  brutalized  proletariat  of  Europe  —  from  whose 
dictation  heaven  help  us !  —  there  is  sound  scientific  warrant 
for  endorsing  in  its  narrowest  form  its  claim  to  be  a  "  chosen 
people."  To-day,  as  the  reader  has  already  gathered,  the 
Ghetto  is  passing  through  one  of  the  greatest  agonies  even  in 
its  own  history.  Six  hundred  thousand  Jews  —  the  same  num- 
ber that  came  up  out  of  the  Egyptian  bondage  thirty-five  cen- 
turies ago  —  have  been  dragging  their  footsore  feet  across  Ga- 
licia  and  Russia,  where  army  after  army  has  laid  waste  their 
dwellings  with  fire  and  slaughter,  seized  their  substance,  and 
profaned  their  women.1  Yet  always  have  they  carried  with 
them  their  scrolls  of  the  Law. 

"  To  some  the  singing  of  the  sword  was  music,"  writes  the 
author  of  "  The  Jewish  Spectre,"  in  a  rhapsody  on  the  virtues 
of  the  mediaeval  Christian  as  compared  with  the  avaricious  trad- 
ing of  the  Ghetto  Jew.  Christendom  is  welcome  to  its  sadic 
butchers.     No  Jew  would  deny  the  greatness  of  its  art  and  lit- 

i  An  appeal  issued  by  the  Jews  of  Paris  for  the  Jews  of  old  Russia  points 
out  that  no  less  than  four  hundred  and  fifty  localities  in  the  former  Rus- 
sian Empire,  inhahited  by  three  million  Jews,  have  been  the  scenes  of  pillage 
and  destruction,  many  of  these  places  now  existing  only  in  name.  More 
than  one  hundred  thousand  Jews  nave  perished  in  the  massacres,  with  more 
than  fifty  thousand  wounded  and  mutilated,  in  addition  to  thousands  of 
Jewesses  violated. 

34, 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

erature  in  the  Middle  Ages,  but  Mr.  Warner,  who  makes  Jew 
and  trader  synonymous,  displays  an  exhaustive  ignorance  of 
the  contributions  made  to  science,  literature  and  philosophy  by 
the  Jews  of  Spain  a  century  or  more  before  Dante,  and  of 
their  share  in  the  Renaissance  —  the  real  European  Renais- 
sance —  begotten  by  the  Moorish  invasion. 

What  particularly  exacerbates  Mr.  Warner  and  his  school 
is  the  Jewish  claim  to  be  the  one  people  to  reveal  God  to  the 
rest  of  the  world,  as  though  this  were  a  monstrous  egotism. 
But,  setting  aside  both  the  metaphysical  implications  and  the 
justice  of  such  a  claim,  I  cannot  see  any  egotism  in  sacrificing 
oneself  to  bring  about  the  triumph  of  a  spiritual  point  of  view. 
It  would  have  been  a  monstrous  egotism  had  the  Jew  said  he 
was  to  be  worshipped;  he  was  merely  throbbing  with  the  vital 
message  he  had  to  deliver,  like  a  messenger  galloping  to  warn  a 
village  of  an  advancing  flood.  His  psychology  is  not  different 
from  that  of  other  men  conscious  of  missions,  and  the  mystery 
of  a  "  chosen  people  "  is  only  part  of  the  general  mystery  of 
genius.  We  do  not  know,  for  example,  why  the  son  of  an  Eng- 
lish professional  cricketer  sets  up  to  be  a  prophet. 

Here  again  we  may  dispense  as  freely  as  Spinoza  with  the 
idea  of  a  revelation  ab  extra,  and  be  content  with  that  sort  of 
inspiration  which  comes  to  all  forms  of  genius  from  within. 
The  ethical  supremacy  of  the  Hebrew  or  the  uniqueness  of  his 
contribution  to  civilization  remains  undisturbed. 

It  is  in  this  unwelcome  supremacy,  in  the  sullen  consciousness 
that  Christianity  is  after  all  a  form  of  Judaism,  that  Mr.  War- 
ner suggestively  finds  "  one  of  the  secrets  of  the  universal  ha- 
tred of  the  Jews  in  the  history  of  Europe."  This  tendency  to 
disparage,  which  we  have  already  noticed  in  Sir  Harry  John- 
ston and  from  which,  as  we  have  seen,  Mr.  Warner  himself  is 
not  free,  constitutes  the  intellectual  variety  of  anti-Semitism. 
"Pride  and  Prejudice"  forbid  an  honest  acknowledgment  — 
even  by  scientists  —  that  the  world  owes  anything  to  the  Jew 
except  money.  Cinderella's  sister-religions  will  not  tolerate 
her  triumph. 

VI 

In  the  quarter  of  a  century  that  has  elapsed  since  I  published 
the  article  on  "  The  Position  of  Judaism  "  in  the  North  Amer- 
ican Review,  there  have  been  such  changes  in  thought  —  in  my 

35 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

own  doubtless  as  well  as  in  that  of  Christians  —  that  there  are 
not  a  few  passages  that  I  should  express  differently  to-day. 
More  allowance  would  have  to  be  made,  for  example,  for  Mod- 
ernist versions  of  Christianity,  and  in  any  case  the  list  of  con- 
temporal^  literary  influences  would  require  some  modification. 
But  beyond  omitting  one  phrase  of  six  words,  which,  though 
true,  is  in  its  wrong  context,  I  have  not  tampered  in  the  faintest 
degree  with  it.  Were  I  once  to  begin  altering,  I  should  refrig- 
erate rather  than  recapture  that  first  lyric  rapture.  It  is  only 
in  youth  that  one  can  paint  the  wood  unobscured  by  the  trees. 
Moreover,  the  large  sweep  of  the  composition  still  corresponds 
in  considerable  measure  to  my  vision  of  the  truth  as  between 
Judaism  and  Christianity.  Indeed,  since  I  wrote,  significant 
approaches  have  been  made  by  Christianity  —  and  even  by 
seceders  from  it,  like  Mr.  Wells  —  towards  the  Jewish  concep- 
tion of  the  Kingdom  of  God  on  earth.  Doubtless  were  I  writ- 
ing the  article  now,  I  should  be  tempted  to  dwell  on  the  supple- 
mentary proof  which  the  great  war  has  afforded  of  the  incapac- 
ity of  Christianity  to  maintain  itself  in  the  real  human  environ- 
ment, or  to  equate  itself  to  life  save  nominally.  I  should  be 
pointing  to  the  series  of  antiquated  Judaisms  or  national  re- 
ligions of  an  Old  Testament  character  into  which  the  Church 
Catholic  transformed  itself;  if,  indeed,  this  "local  colour"  of 
Christianity  was  not  always  latent,  being  merely  brought  into 
clear  visibility,  like  a  secret  ink,  by  the  fire  of  war.  A  fair- 
weather  Christianity  is  as  useless  as  a  fair-weather  Freedom, 
and  unhappily,  in  every  land  boasting  of  either,  the  war  re- 
vealed both  Freedom  and  Christianity  as  of  this  spurious  brand. 
This  decomposition  of  Christendom  under  stress  of  war  into 
spitfire  nationalities  has  been  overlooked  by  Kuenen,  as  by 
other  historians  of  theological  evolution,  who  assume  that  be- 
cause Christianity  started  out  as  universalistic,  it  has  been  able 
to  maintain  itself  at  that  width,  whereas  the  "  Christian  broth- 
erhood "  with  which  "  Jewish  exclusiveness  "  is  so  unfavourably 
contrasted,  has  had  no  more  verification  by  practice  than  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount.  Would  that  in  this  absence  of  interna- 
tional fraternity  these  nations  had  at  least  produced  an  Amos 
to  transfuse  their  tribalism  with  internal  brotherhood! 

"  Truly  it  leaves  an  indelible  stigma  to  have  crucified  Jesus," 
said  Pierre  Loti,  shuddering  at  the  faces  of  the  Jews  of  Jerusa- 
lem. "  Perhaps  one  must  come  here  to  be  properly  convinced 
of   it,   but  it  is   indisputable :   there   is   a   particular   sign   in- 

36 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

scribed  on  all  these  foreheads,  there  is  a  seal  of  dishonour  with 
which  this  race  is  marked."  It  was  a  phenomenon  which  I  had 
not  myself  remarked  in  the  tribes  at  the  Wailing  Wall.  On 
the  contrary,  I  remembered  countenances  as  beautiful  and  ten- 
der as  the  Da  Vinci  Christ,  heads  as  noble  as  those  of  the  grey- 
bearded  senators  in  the  Venetian  masterpieces,  or  the  Rabbis 
that  Rembrandt  found  in  the  birthplace  of  Spinoza.  The 
stamp  I  had  seen  was  the  seal  of  sorrow  and  suffering,  of  the 
brooding  East.  But  doubtless  I  was  prejudiced:  the  impartial 
eye  of  the  cosmopolitan  amorist  saw  this  brand  of  Cain  even  in 
the  faces  of  little  rosy  children,  "  pretty  perhaps,  but  the  eyes 
too  furtive,  the  attitude  too  sullen;  already  they  seem  con- 
scious of  the  hereditary  shame." 

And  as  a  Jew  who  has  felt  the  ancient  crime  of  his  people,  I 
was  not  comforted  to  hear  that  it  could  not  be  shaken  off:  that 
it  was  stamped  into  our  very  visages.  In  vain  I  told  myself 
that  crucifixion  was  a  Roman,  not  a  Jewish  punishment ;  that 
the  claim  to  be  more  than  man  —  which  even  Loti  rejects  — 
was  a  blasphemy  to  the  stern  Hebrew  proclaimer  of  the  one  sole 
God:  in  vain  I  protested  that  the  death  of  Socrates  was  not 
visited  on  the  Greeks  nor  of  Savonarola  on  the  Italians,  nor  of 
Joan  of  Arc  on  the  English,  there  remained  nevertheless  weigh- 
ing upon  me  the  long  odious  tradition  of  the  centuries,  the 
changeless  Christian  hate,  which  has  turned  the  "  Judengas- 
sen  "  into  shambles  and  which,  even  as  I  write,  is  chronicling 
itself  in  fresh  lines  of  blood  in  forlorn  Ghettos  of  Galicia  and 
the  Ukraine,  lost  in  the  fog  of  "  peace."  Perhaps,  I  thought, 
recalling  the  greatness  of  this  martyred  Son  of  the  Jews,  it 
was  a  righteous  historic  Nemesis  that  has  nailed  his  people  on 
the  cross  for  two  thousand  years.  Justly,  perhaps,  do  the 
nations  spit  in  Shylock's  face  and  pluck  at  his  gaberdine. 

But  now,  at  last,  from  my  soul  the  shadow  is  lifted.  The 
war,  so  measureless  in  agony,  has  brought  this  at  least  of  allevi- 
ation. Christendom  has  been  put  to  the  test  as  Judaea  was 
tested,  and  has  emerged  even  more  shamefully.  For  Judaea, 
though  it  crucified  Jesus,  did  not  crucify  its  own  doctrines. 
And  against  the  crowd  clamouring  for  the  blood  of  Jesus  we 
may  set  the  crowd  that  saved  Jeremiah  even  from  the  priests 
and  state-prophets  demanding  his  death:  Jeremiah  whose  life 
and  wrord  proclaim,  according  to  an  eminent  Christian  theo- 
logian, "  the  nature  and  duty  of  true  patriotism  —  to  oppose 
your  country's  policy  when  it  is  wrong:  at  the  peril  of  liberty 

37 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

and  life,  to  set  loyalty  to  God  and  justice  above  loyalty  to 
King  and  country."  And  in  no  country  of  Christendom  to-day 
have  we  seen  the  remotest  public  recognition  of  such  minority 
patriotism ;  on  the  contrary,  we  have  seen  it  rewarded  with  the 
stone,  the  bullet,  exile,  or  the  prison  cell.  We  have  seen  Jaures 
assassinated  and  his  assassin  found  guiltless. 

"  When  you  are  told  to  do  something,"  says  "  The  Catholic 
Child's  Little  Sermons,"  "  imagine  that  you  hear  our  Lady  and 
St.  Joseph  telling  the  Divine  Child  Jesus  to  do  the  same,  and 
consider  how  diligently  he  obeyed  them  and  you  will  find  it 
easy  to  be  obedient."  There  are  gentle  sectarians,  quiet  wor- 
shippers, whose  imagination  does  not  find  it  easy  to  picture 
Jesus  jetting  poison-gas  or  charging  with  the  bayonet,  but  not 
even  a  lifetime  of  noble  civic  activity  has  saved  them  from  the 
fate  of  the  burglar  and  the  child-raper.  This  in  Protestant 
England.  But  even  in  the  Catholic  world  the  very  Vicar  of 
Christ  has  been  howled  down  when  he  breathed  the  beatitudes  of 
the  Master.  And  so,  beholding  the  measure  meted  out  to  those 
who,  proclaiming  the  eternal  laws  of  righteousness  and  justice, 
of  love  and  pity  and  chivalry,  deny  no  divinity  but  that  of  the 
mob;  though  I  am  ashamed  for  Western  civilization,  I  am  at 
last  reconciled  to  my  race.  For  it  has  become  clear  —  O  grim 
consolation!  —  that  there  is  no  nation  to-day  that  would  not 
crucify  Christ,  and  this  although,  unlike  the  ancient  Jews,  they 
have  had  two  millenniums  wherein  to  learn  to  understand  him. 
Nay  more!  Remembering  who  during  this  ghastly  quinquen- 
nium have  raised  their  voices  to  temper  the  frenzy  and  bru- 
tality of  Christendom,  I  am  moved  to  believe  that  we  Jews  are 
to-day  the  only  race  that  would  not  crucify  Jesus.1 


VII 

From  a  purely  theological  point  of  view  the  popular  distinc- 
tion of  Judaism  from  Christianity  may  be  seen  at  a  glance  in 
the  synagogue  hymn,  Adon  Oleum  —  the  version  is  from  my 
"  Blind  Children." 

"  Lord  of  the  world,  He  reigned  alone 
While  yet  the  universe  was  naught. 
When  by  His  will  all  things  were  wrought. 
Then  first  His  sovran  name  was  known. 

i "  Amid  the  barbaric  Bcreaming  of  .jinpo-tunes  it  seemed  that  the  effec- 
tive Christians  were  the  Jews."     J.  L.  Garvin  in  The  Observer. 

38 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

And  when  the  All  shall  cease  to  be, 

In  dread  lone  splendour  He  shall  reign. 
He  was,  He  is,  He  shall  remain 

In  glorious  eternity. 

For  He  is  one,  no  second  shares 

His  nature  or  His  loneliness; 

Unending  and  beginningless, 
All  strength  is  His,  all  sway  He  bears." 

This  is  not  far  removed  from  Herbert  Spencer's  "  infinite  and 
eternal  energy  from  which  all  things  proceed." 

But  the  Unknowable  is  not  the  Unlovable,  nor  the  Untrust- 
able,  and  to  sink  into  this  incomprehensible  infinitude  is  —  in 
the  concluding  stanzas  of  the  hymn  —  to  find  deeper  life. 
That  is  what  Judaism  adds  to  Herbert  Spencer. 

He  is  the  living  God  to  save, 

My  Rock  while  sorrow's  toils  endure, 

My  banner  and  my  stronghold  sure, 
The  cup  of  life  whene'er  I  crave. 

I  place  my  soul  within  His  palm 

Before  I  sleep  as  when  I  wake, 

And,  though  my  body  I  forsake, 
Rest  in  the  Lord  in  fearless  calm." 

Thus  the  Hebrew  required  no  mediacy  by  way  of  a  human- 
ised aspect  of  a  trinitarian  whole ;  indeed,  he  found  the  idea  of 
vicarious  atonement  opposed  to  his  virile  sense  of  Justice. 

For  two  thousand  years  he  battled  against  the  notion,  agon- 
ised at  the  Stake  for  it,  paid  for  his  protestantism 

"  By  the  torture,  prolonged  from  age  to  age, 
By  the  infamy,  Israel's  heritage, 
By  the  Ghetto's  plague,  by  the  garb's  disgrace, 
By  the  badge  of  shame,  by  the  felon's  place, 
By  the  branding  tool,  the  bloody  whip, 
And  the  summons  to  Christian  fellowship." 

And  now,  when  this  aspect  of  his  thought  is  at  last  gaining  ac- 
ceptance or  at  least  sympathy,  the  author  of  "  The  Jewish 
Spectre  "  can  write  as  follows : 

"  The  vital  thought  in  the  religion  of  Jesus  has  been  now  two 
thousand  years   struggling  for  existence.     It  is   the  value   of  the 

39 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

individual,  and  his  direct,  unalterable  connection  with  God,  between 
whom  and  himself  there  is  no  priest,  middleman,  or  tax  gatherer 
possible." 

It  is  a  characteristic  example  of  the  persecution  of  the  Jew 
in  literature.  The  roles  are  —  brazenly  or  ignorantly  —  re- 
versed. Black  is  white  and  white  is  black.  Nay,  more!  Mr. 
Warner  goes  on: 

"  This  was  not  a  reconstruction.  It  was  not  '  a  reform  within  the 
party,'  the  device  of  timid  souls ;  it  was  a  revolution.  The  Sanhe- 
drim knew  this;  it  could  not  kill  the  idea,  it  killed  the  body." 

In  short,  the  Jews  killed  Jesus  because  he  taught  their  own 
doctrine  of  direct  relation  with  God !  All  the  greater  irony, 
then,  that  Jesus  should  have  become  the  very  intermediary  that 
he  deprecated.  But  of  the  travesty  of  Jewish  history  there  is 
no  limit,  and  the  end  is  not  yet.  We  shall  yet  hear  that  it  was 
their  ghoulish  insistence  on  salvation  by  blood  that  made  the 
Jews  the  odium  of  the  human  race.  Possibly  it  is  Mr.  Ches- 
terton who  will  formulate  that  indictment.  Already  Nietzsche 
has  accused  them  of  foisting  a  lachrymose  deity  and  an  emas- 
culated gospel  on  the  blonde  brave  conquering  races.  And  if 
there  are  many  to  disparage  the  Jewish  contribution,  there  are 
few  to  acknowledge  it.  When  Lord  Bryce  said  recently  that 
there  were  only  three  or  four  great  religions  left  in  the  world, 
and  that  these  were  being  reduced  to  two  or  three,  we  may  be 
sure  Judaism  was  not  in  his  mind  for  the  final  running,  unprej- 
udiced and  encyclopaedic  as  that  mind  is.  Judaism  has,  in 
sooth,  not  kept  pace  with  the  age:  it  does  not  advertise.  And 
it  is  handicapped  by  the  unpopularity  of  the  Jew.  The  in- 
tellectual anti-Semitism,  which  I  have  just  noted,  still  calmly 
labels  all  the  Old  Testament  virtues  as  "  Christian  "  (as  though 
before  the  advent  of  Jesus  the  world  was  a  nest  of  vipers,  and 
God  the  Father  had  lived  utterly  withdrawn,  like  an  old  cur- 
mudgeon who  is  only  dragged  into  society  at  the  heels  of  his 
son).  The  Old  Testament  is  left  alone  to  face  the  batteries  of 
Dutch  or  German  Bible-criticism,  as  if  the  New  were  immune 
from  the  shells  that  shatter  what  was  always  regarded  as  its 
foundation.  The  Vatican,  with  its  inflexible  doctrine  of  the 
Infallibility  of  Scripture,  knows  better.  The  sacred  texts  of 
both  Testaments  are  the  literature  of  the  same  Hebrew  people, 
and  the  New  is  so  deeply  rooted  in  the  Old  that  it  is  not  pos- 
sible, as  so  many  Christian  theologians  have  attempted  to  do, 

40 


THE  VOICE  OF  JEEUSALEM 

to  undermine  the  authority  of  the  parental  text  without  weak- 
ening the  authority  of  the  doctrines  that  drew  their  sustenance 
from  it.  Doubtless  some  of  this  modern  Biblical  criticism  is 
itself  destined  to  be  undermined.  But  it  does  not  need  the  dis- 
putable erudition  of  the  Sherlock  Holmeses  of  scholarship  to 
convince  the  modern  world  that  the  traditional  narrative  of 
both  Testaments  —  and  still  more  their  traditional  interpreta- 
tion —  is  unacceptable.  Neither  religion  in  its  orthodox  shape 
has  issued  unscathed  from  the  furnace  of  modern  thought ;  Jud- 
aism and  Christianity  alike  need  a  new  orientation,  or,  should 
we  not  say,  a  new  occidentation. 

Both,  in  fact,  must  now  seek  their  authority,  not  in  their 
scriptures  nor  in  their  historic  setting,  but  in  the  human  soul. 
The  theory  of  verbal  inspiration  must  be  jettisoned:  it  was  a 
meaningless  conception  which  owed  its  existence  to  the  fact  that 
nobody  ever  read  the  Bible,  even  though  thousands  knew  every 
word  by  heart.  But  then  most  people  cannot  even  read  the 
newspaper:  that  is,  they  are  unable  to  seize  the  essence  of  the 
news  of  the  day,  or  to  perceive  the  most  flagrant  contradictions 
in  the  editorial  thought  or  temper. 

The  whole  idea  of  the  "  Bible  "  is  un-Jewish.  The  Hebrews 
did  not  possess  a  "  Bible,"  but  sacred  scriptures  — "  Law, 
Prophets,  and  Scribes  " —  all  selected  by  the  Synagogue  itself 
from  a  mass  of  literature,  much  of  which  was  set  aside  as  apo- 
crypha. This  makes  it  all  the  odder  that  the  inaccuracies  of 
the  versions  in  European  tongues  should  of  themselves  have 
grown  sacred,  and  that  our  own  revised  version  should  still 
provoke  resentment.  In  Athens  in  1901  a  new  rendering  even 
led  to  fatal  riots.  Such  manifestations,  however,  show  clearly 
that  the  idea  of  verbal  inspiration  is  a  growth  due  to  the  conse- 
cration of  use,  to  a  hallowing  process  which  is  not  even  limited 
to  religious  literature.  It  has  attached  itself  almost  equally 
to  all  literature  that  has  become  classical,  and  there  are  pietists 
who  will  no  more  have  a  comma  or  a  syllable  altered  in  Shake- 
speare than  in  the  Bible.  The  orthodoxy  of  a  religion  may  be 
defined  as  its  adjustment  to  the  average  mentality,  which  in- 
variably reduces  truths  that  are  various,  flexible,  flowing  and 
natural,  to  symmetry,  homogeneity,  rigidity  and  miraculous- 
ness.  From  this  stereotyped  distortion  neither  Judaism  nor 
Christianity  has  escaped,  and  this  moment  of  common  percep- 
tion of  common  error  would  seem  the  Heaven-sent  opportunity 
for  common  readjustment  of  values.     But  the  Jewish  savant 

41 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

still  considers  the  great  tragic  poem  of  the  New  Testament  neg- 
ligible, and  the  Christian  savant  is  busy  reducing  all  the  Jewish 
concepts  to  Babylonian  or  Egyptian  sources,  or  denying  Sem- 
itic birth  to  Jesus.  And  yet  the  only  fundamental  quarrel  be- 
tween the  creeds  is  that  of  his  divinity.  Not  monotheism  is 
the  ground  of  difference  —  we  are  all  monotheists  to-day,  if 
we  are  not  atheists  or  agnostics.  "  The  central  problem  of 
natural  theology,"  drily  observes  Dr.  Frazer,  in  his  preface  to 
"  The  Belief  in  Immortality,"  "  has  narrowed  itself  down  to 
the  question:  Is  there  one  God  or  none?  " 

But  though  Christianity  and  Judaism  agree  in  overriding  the 
Persian  dualism  and  in  conceiving  the  force  behind  phenomena 
as  personal,  moral  and  omnipotent,  they  remain  absolutely 
apart.  The  Church  will  not  officially  give  up  incarnation  and 
mediation,  and  the  Synagogue,  though  it  has  not  infrequently 
and  in  varying  guises  evolved  them  over  again  as  heresies,  is 
still  adamant  to  their  reception.  It  still  tends  to  ignore  the 
reminder  of  Jesus  that  the  divinity  of  every  man  is  asserted 
in  the  eighty-second  psalm,  or  even  that  it  is  enounced  more 
primitively  in  the  assertion  of  Genesis  that  God  created  man 
in  His  own  image.  By  "  His  own  image  "  is  obviously  meant 
His  spiritual  nature.  But  though  at  the  very  beginnings  of 
Judaism  Abraham  is  shown  as  summoning  God  before  the  com- 
mon tribunal  of  Reason  and  Justice,  orthodox  Judaism  prefers 
to  abase  itself  before  an  Oriental  despot,  to  whom  we  arc  in- 
sects of  a  day  (see  the  Synagogue  Poems,  "  Highest  Divinity  " 
and  "  Laus  Deo,"  in  this  volume).  There  is  more  true  Judaism 
in  the  famous  dying  mot  of  Heine:  "  Dieu  me  pardonnera, 
e'est  son  metier."  In  this  still  unresolved  quarrel  of  Church 
and  Synagogue,  both  sides  forget  that  the  future  will  belong 
to  the  religion  that  first  fits  itself  to  the  future. 


VIII 

Even  Mr.  Claude  Montefiore,  whose  saintly  life-work  has  sup- 
plied an  eirenicon  between  Judaism  and  Christianity,  as  between 
Judaism  and  Hellenism,  holds  out  no  near  prospect  of  fusion  or 
federation  between  his  Liberal  Synagogue  and  the  Church,  or 
what  is  more  practicable,  between  ex-Jews  and  ex-Christians, 
and  despite  his  antagonism  to  Zionism  and  Jewish  Nationalism, 
he  shrinks  from  proclaiming  his  gospel  urbi  et  orbi.      His  sect 

42 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

replaces  the  narrowness  of  Jewish  nationalism  by  the  narrow- 
ness of  British  nationalism,  and  his  religion,  swathed  as  it  is  in 
shreds  of  Jewish  ritual  and  tatters  of  Hebrew  tradition,  still 
makes  its  appeal  to  the  Jews  alone;  it  even  finds  its  readiest 
echo  in  the  Ghetto  north  of  Hyde  Park.  For  what  reason  Mr. 
Montefiore,  having  evolved  for  himself  a  religion  so  noble  and 
sustaining,  so  rational  and  universal,  yet  addresses  his  ministra- 
tions to  the  Jews  exclusively,  I  have  never  been  able  to  make 
out,  though  I  often  suspect  that  he  is  the  greatest  nationalist 
of  us  all.  The  old  Judaism,  like  Catholicism,  was  a  complete 
organism,  with  a  soul  and  an  aura  of  its  own.  Mr.  Monte- 
fiore, under  the  pressure  of  modern  thought,  transforms  the 
structure,  evaporates  the  aroma  (if  not  the  spiritual  essence), 
destroys  all  that  dear  intensity  of  concrete  certitude,  yet  gives 
us  no  compensation  for  the  loss  in  intension  by  an  increase  in 
extension. 

But,  really,  it  scarcely  seems  worth  while  for  Judaism  to  go 
through  such  tragic  travail  of  soul  only  to  come  out  almost  as 
tribal  as  before;  even  the  New  Testament,  that  work  of  ex- 
clusively Jewish  authorship,  being  still  excluded  from  the  Jew- 
ish curriculum.  Mr.  Montefiore,  as  I  say,  struggles  against 
himself  and  his  parochial  followers,  for  at  heart  he  obviously 
aspires  to  make  the  Synagogue  universal,  and  he  tries  to  do 
justice  even  to  the  Gospels.  But  if  (as  he  expressly  declares 
on  p.  324  of  his  "  Outlines  of  Liberal  Judaism  ")  to  the  world 
as  a  whole  the  Bible  will  always  continue  to  include  the  New 
Testament  as  well  as  the  Old,  how  is  this  to  be  reconciled  with 
the  hope  of  Judaising  the  world?  Indeed,  so  far  as  the  con- 
tradictory passage  of  the  next  page  has  any  meaning,  his 
prophecy  that  the  religion  of  the  future  "  will  be  a  developed 
and  purified  Judaism,"  and  will  cherish  the  New  Testament, 
seems  to  accept  as  a  fact  that  Judaism  proper  will  still  re- 
main outside  the  next  world-religion.  O  lame  and  impotent 
conclusion !  only  intelligible  if  Mr.  Montefiore  is  really  the  most 
secret  and  passionate  of  Zionists.  Mr.  Montefiore  seeks  to 
evade  this  conclusion  by  pleading  that  the  Jews  have  to  re- 
main a  distinct  religious  community  "  for  a  very  long  time  in- 
deed." This  is  time-serving  at  its  most  literal.  But  what  a 
waste  of  work,  after  destroying  the  old  Judaism,  to  create 
merely  a  new  Ghetto !  If  the  Martians  were  to  invade  the 
earth,  men  of  all  colours  would  be  found  fighting  side  by  side, 
and  the  black  peril  and  the  yellow  peril  would  be  forgotten. 

43 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

So  in  a  period  when  the  divine,  and  even  the  ethical,  are  sav- 
agely questioned  and  assailed,  one  would  rather  expect  theists 
to  stand  together  than  to  let  themselves  be  sundered  by  theo- 
logical systems  equally  unintelligible. 

And  I  should  have  thought  the  line  of  the  future  for  theists 
lay  rather  in  coming  to  some  understanding  on  the  divinity  of 
Jesus.  If  Christians  are  ready  to  abandon  the  doctrines  of  the 
Incarnation  and  the  Atonement,  in  their  narrow  individual  and 
episodical  sense,  there  is  no  reason  why  Jews  should  not  admit 
that  the  heroic  tragedy  of  the  great  Galilean  illumines  the  cos- 
mic problem  of  suffering.  Has  Mr.  Montefiore  really  consid- 
ered the  Jewish  God  profoundly  enough?  Is  it  absolutely 
necessary  to  make  Him  so  perfectly  happy?  "  The  Jewish 
doctrine  of  God,"  he  says,  "  is  not  afraid  to  declare  that  the 
divine  perfection  excludes  the  idea  of  suffering."  It  would 
be  truer  to  say  that  the  Jewish  doctrine  of  God  has  never 
been  thought  out,  perhaps  because  the  genius  of  Judaism  shies 
at  schematics,  and  prefers  the  "  healthy  contradiction  "  of  life. 
Jewish  literature  by  no  means  shrinks  from  presenting  images 
of  a  deity  in  distress.  Genesis,  vi.  6  shows  Him  repenting  of 
having  made  man,  and  "  grieved  at  His  heart,"  and  the  wrath 
so  freely  attributed  to  Him  throughout  the  Bible  cannot  be  en- 
tirely pleasurable,  however  righteous.  It  is  true  that  when 
Jewish  philosophy  was  created  —  under  Arabic-Aristotelean  in- 
fluence in  the  tenth  century  —  Saadia  denied  that  God  could 
suffer,  but  only  at  the  cost  of  proving  that  we  cannot  attribute 
to  Him  any  action  or  feeling  whatever  —  a  demonstration 
which  Maimonides,  two  centuries  later,  carried  to  even  deadlier 
completeness.  Mr.  Montefiore  is  no  academic  philosopher,  but 
a  live  thinker,  who  rightly  bases  religion  on  experience. 
Whence,  then,  this  professorial  conviction  that  suffering  would 
impair  "  the  divine  perfection  "?  He  is  a  model  of  iirieUeia,  but 
here,  surely,  there  is  more  of  Christophobia  than  of  "  sweet 
reasonableness  "  and  objectivity.  Unmanly  as  it  may  be  to  ac- 
cept vicarious  suffering,  to  tender  it  is  divine.  And  since  he 
expressly  approves  George  Eliot's  sentiment  that  the  highest 
human  life  is  one  of  conscious  voluntary  suffering,  why  should 
the  highest  divine  life  exclude  it?  God  is  described  in  the  Old 
Testament  as  "  long-suffering."  This  may  not  quite  reach 
to  "  suffering,"  but  without  some  degree  of  rufflement  in  face  of 
the  persistence  of  sin  the  expression  is  meaningless.  The 
Midrash,  according  to  Rabbi  Enelow,  said  with  Isaiah,  Betsar- 
athom  lo  tsar,  "  in  the  sufferings  of  His  creatures  comes  suffer- 

44 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ing  to  Him."  Indeed,  what  does  Mr.  Montefiore  mean  by  cry- 
ing, in  one  of  his  few  impassioned  passages,  "  God  cares.  He 
must  care"?  For  "caring"  already  involves  "care."  Mr. 
Montefiore  is  fond  of  the  phrase,  "  the  fatherhood  of  God." 
But  "  fatherhood  "  is  not  a  mere  genealogical  concept.  It  in- 
volves the  anxiety,  as  well  as  the  protecting  love,  of  human 
fatherhood. 

Mr.  Coventry  Patmore  is  the  only  English  poet  whom  Mr. 
Montefiore  quotes.  But  why  did  he  not  consider  the  father's 
words  in  the  famous  lines  on  "  The  Toys  "  ? 


"  And  I,  with  moan, 
Kissing  away  his  tears,  left  others  of  my  own." 


Or, 


"  Then,  fatherly  not  less 
Than  I,  whom  Thou  hast  moulded  from  the  clay, 
Thou'lt  leave  Thy  wrath,  and  say, 
'  I  will  be  sorry  for  their  childishness.'  " 

Indeed,  we  find  this  exact  note  in  a  Synagogue  poem  of  the 
tenth  century,  by  a  Rabbi  of  Mainz,  which  is  recited  on  the  eve 
of  the  Day  of  Atonement :  — 

"  He  is  a  God  who  softens  at  our  cry. 
'  It  is  my  people's  ignorance/  He  saith." 

It  is  a  pity  Mr.  Montefiore  does  not  draw  more  on  the  rich 
vein  of  Jewish  mysticism,  especially  when  one  need  go  no  further 
than  the  Prayer  Book  to  find  lines  like  — 

"  His  glory  is  on  me,  and  mine  on  Him." 

An  angry  and  even  a  furious  God  is  a  commonplace  of  the 
prophets  —  see  for  example  the  opening  of  "  Nahum  " —  and  a 
God  subject  to  one  emotion  can  experience  another  or  must  be 
reduced  to  a  stream  of  tendency,  or  to  that  nullity  according  to 
which,  as  a  German  mystic  put  it,  "  God  may  not  improperly 
be  said  to  be  nothing." 

I  am  afraid  Mr.  Montefiore's  God  is  too  abstract  for  the 
people,  and  too  concrete  for  the  philosopher.  Either  Mr. 
Montefiore  must  define  Him  by  negatives  in  the  manner  of 
Maimonides,  and  reduce  Him  to  a  sterile  Xn,  or  he  must  boldly, 
and  in  defiance  of  Israel's  great  philosopher,  go  on  to  a  certain 
anthropomorphism. 

45 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

No,  it  is  not  the  trinitarian  nature  of  the  one  God  that  could 
divide  Judaism  from  Christianity  —  a  conscious  Absolute,  as 
Schelling  saw,  involves  a  trinity  —  it  is  the  isolated  incarnation 
of  one  aspect  of  this  trinity,  under  cirumstances  so  improb- 
able that  the  Church  Calendar  records  its  circumcision.  'Tis  a 
piece  of  alleged  history  which  Judaism  primarily  denies.  As  I 
have  elsewhere  pointed  out,  in  so  mysterious  a  world  anything 
may  happen,  and  we  are  not  entitled  to  deny  anything  a  priori. 
The  Resurrection  is  no  more  impossible  than  that  King  Arthur 
or  Barbarossa  or  even  Kitchener  is  still  alive.  But  improbable 
happenings  or  unintelligible  concepts  must  rest  on  peculiarly 
weighty  historic  evidence,  and  there  is  no  iota  forthcoming. 
Credat  Judacus  April  a,  who  must  have  been  a  Christian !  The 
Resurrection,  in  a  spiritual  sense,  is  another  matter.  And  if 
the  Church  instead  of  crucifying  Christ's  doctrine,  had  rested 
her  case  on  the  world's  inability  to  destroy  it,  even  by  the  Great 
War,  she  would  have  been  infinitely  stronger  to-day. 

If  the  Synagogue  has  perhaps  erred  in  seeing  God  too  tran- 
scendentally  as  a  supremely  wise  and  merciful  cadi,  with  no 
troubles  of  His  own,  majestic,  unruffled,  and  unchangeable,  the 
Church  has  erred  much  more  gravely  at  the  other  extreme  in 
giving  to  the  cosmic  pain  and  passion  so  narrow,  concrete  and 
monopolistic  a  materialisation  as  a  detachable  person  of  a 
trinity,  with  a  specific  albeit  superhuman  biography.  Apart 
from  the  Synagogue's  rejection  of  vicarious  atonement,  its  doc- 
trine of  direct  relation  with  God  renders  such  an  intermediary 
superfluous.  For  its  monotheism  is  not  merely  arithmetical. 
As  antistrophe  on  strophe  there  follows  on  "  Hear,  O  Israel, 
the  Lord  thy  God,  the  Lord  is  One,"  the  beatification  of  the 
glor\r  of  His  timeless  Kingdom,  and  the  mystical  imperative  to 
"love  Him  with  all  thy  heart  and  all  thy  soul  and  all  thy 
might."  Here  is  a  communion  intimate  enough  for  a  neo- 
Platomst.  Nor  has  the  ecstasy  of  faith  ever  reached  rarer 
heights  than  in  the  Kaddish  for  the  dead,  which  contains  no 
word  of  grief,  nothing  save  adoration  of  the  source  of  life, 
imageless  and  ineffable.  The  Old  Masters  may  have  painted 
Jehovah  with  a  benevolent  beard,  but  the  Old  Masters  were 
Christians. 

The  notion  that  the  original  Mosaic  core  of  the  religion 
escaped  development  is  a  vulgar  error.  Just  as  Maimonides 
discarded  the  anthropomorphisms  of  the  Pentateuch,  so  for 
example  the  law  of  "  eye  for  eye  "  disappeared  in  the  Gemara's 

46 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

demonstration  that  by  it  a  blind  eye-destroyer  would  go  scot- 
free,  and  a  one-eyed  be  over-punished.  Indeed,  a  Hebrew 
satirist  has  pictured  an  angry  Jehovah  demanding  back  His  law 
from  a  faithless  people  and  recoiling  in  amazement  before  the 
ever-rolling  waggon-loads  of  ponderous  folios,  unrecognisable, 
innumerable.  But  the  line  of  development,  if  it  is  now  tending 
towards  recognition  of  the  exalted  place  of  Jesus  in  the  long 
succession  of  Hebrew  prophets,  shows,  as  I  have  said,  no  indica- 
tion of  acceptance  of  the  incarnation;  on  the  contrary,  there 
are,  and  still  more  markedly  than  I  claimed  in  that  old  article  in 
the  North  American  Review,  signs  of  Christianity  tending  back, 
despite  itself,  towards  the  teaching  of  the  Synagogue.  This  is 
not  to  say  that  when  Christian  teachers  and  sects  have  dropped 
the  heresy  which  differentiated  their  religion  from  the  parent 
stock,  they  have  had  the  grace  to  recant.  Martineau,  the 
Unitarian,  still  calls  his  book  "  The  Christian  Life."  For 
Eucken,  although  Jesus  is  not  divine,  the  "  Absolute  Religion  " 
that  remains  after  shedding  the  Christ  story  is  — "  Christian- 
ity !  "  Just  so,  for  Fichte  it  was  the  Gospel  of  St.  John ;  for 
Hegel  —  Lutheranism.  For,  as  Disraeli  said,  "  With  words  we 
govern  men." 

Probably  the  real  difficulty  of  reconciling  religions  lies  less  in 
their  tenets  than  in  their  entanglement  with  financial  institu- 
tions and  vested  interests. 

Words  and  institutions  apart,  the  battle  of  the  future  is  not 
between  Judaism  and  Christianity,  and  though  my  thesis  is  still 
nailed  up,  unrefuted  and  irrefutable,  neither  twenty-five  years 
ago,  nor  to-day,  was  it  or  is  it  my  purpose  to  produce  an 
absolute  apologia  for  Judaism  or  an  unmitigated  polemic 
against  Christianity.  The  difference  between  the  two  religions 
is  merely  atomic.  Both  are  compounded  of  the  same  elements, 
only  in  different  proportions.  This  is  not  to  deny  that  the 
chemical  result  is  different.  But  it  is  to  affirm  that  their  affin- 
ities are  greater  than  their  mutual  repulsions.  Their  differ- 
ences are  minor  and  adjustable  compared  with  their  common 
antagonism  to  atheism,  polytheism,  and  pragmatic  pluralism. 
This  last,  at  which  William  James  clutched  in  his  desperate 
struggles  to  escape  from  the  iron  ring  of  materialism,  contains 
all  the  chaos  of  polytheism  without  even  the  consolation  of  gods. 
Such  a  universe  is  not  even  a  universe ;  we  may  become  the  prey 
of  its  cross-purposes,  as  mortals  became  the  sport  of  the  celes- 
tials in  that  "  Free  Enquiry  "   of  Soame  Jenyns,  which   Dr. 

47 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Johnson  derided.  The  mechanical  universe  was  at  least  reliable 
and  more  or  less  malleable  by  man,  and  no  one  except  Mr. 
Hardy  anthropomorphised  it  as  malicious.  Mr.  Hardy  is, 
however,  an  Aristotle  compared  with  the  intellects  that  play 
with  polytheism.  Wagner's  make-believe  with  the  old  German 
gods  led  inevitably  to  a  half-belief,  swelling  with  a  sense  of 
national  ownership.  (Richter  once  told  me  he  felt  this  Teu- 
tonic theology  througli  Wagner's  music.)  Already  the  charge 
against  the  Jews  begins  to  be,  not  that  they  killed  Christ,  but 
that  they,  with  their  Christ,  killed  the  old  national  gods. 
Chauvinism  is  creeping  into  theology,  and  lament  for  the 
slaughter  of  these  innocents  is  becoming  the  dernier  cri  of 
decadence.  Nietzsche  calls  for  a  new  chronology  (after  him- 
self), and  Judaism,  after  fifteen  centuries  of  persecution  for 
denying  Jesus,  now  stands  indicted  for  producing  him.  "  La 
latinita,"  corroborates  a  recent  Italian  writer,  "  e  stata  rovi- 
nata  due  volte  da  due  visionarie,  entrambi  ebrei:  Cristo  e  Carlo 
Marx."  Two  Jews,  Christ  and  Karl  Marx,  have  ruined  Latin 
civilization!  And  so  the  racial  Valhallas  are  revisited,  pil- 
grimages are  made  to  the  Pantheons.  Mr.  George  Moore, 
crawling  down  strange  subterranean  passages,  goes  on  his  hands 
as  well  as  on  his  knees  to  invoke  quaint  Irish  deities.  Mr. 
Maurice  Hewlett  is  subject  to  epiphanies  of  old  Greek  gods  and 
mediaeval  fairies.  It  is  the  more  surprising  in  Mr.  Hewlett,  who 
has  not  displayed  this  frivolity  over  politics.  But  these  indica- 
tions are  enough  to  show  that  no  human  absurdity  lies  finally 
behind  us.  As  for  morals,  one  thought  that  ethics,  at  least,  had 
escaped  from  the  confusions  of  theology ;  but  in  such  a  mirror 
of  the  age  as  "  Jean  Christophe,"  nothing  is  more  curious  than 
the  senescent  musician's  assumption  —  an  assumption  that 
reconciles  him  to  all  the  Futurist  morals  of  the  young  genera- 
tion—  that  there  is  no  objective  gauge  of  right  or  wrong,  no 
standard  but  the  individual  whim.  If  this  Pyrrhonism  of  to- 
dav,  naturally  intensified  by  the  ethical  anarchy  of  the  war, 
passes  away  before  a  new  religious  conception,  it  is  difficult  to 
see  how  that  conception  can  differ  fundamentally  from  one  of 
the  two  aspects  of  .Judaism.  For  if  it  is  theistic,  it  is  not  likely 
to  be  other  than  monotheistic,  and  if  it  is  not  theistic,  what 
remains  but  sociology  and  the  service  of  man?  "  Let  judgment 
run  down  as  waters  and  righteousness  as  a  mighty  stream." 


48 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


IX 

Taken  as  literature  and  history,  the  Bible  reveals  a  soul 
struggling  through  error  and  savage  survivals,  and  yearning 
forward  to  world-perfection  and  peace,  much  as  the  world  at 
large  reveals  a  vital  energy  labouring  through  masses  of  slag 
and  stone,  or  a  spiritual  energy  beating  itself  against  the 
egotism  of  animal  life.  A  new  and  more  durable  "  Butler's 
Analogy  "  might  be  written  on  this  basis,  and  would  be  found 
to  present  interesting  analogies  with  Mr.  Wells's  recent  thesis 
of  a  God  not  omnipotent.  Neither  the  Synagogue  nor  the 
Church,  except  possibly  by  way  of  the  Albigenses,  Cathari  and 
suchlike  sects,  has  yet  however  explored  or  adopted  this  line  of 
thought,  though  it  is  compatible  with  —  perhaps  even  implied 
in  —  any  doctrine  of  necessary  sacrifice,  whether  of  a  Christ- 
people  or  of  an  individual  Christ.  "  Progress  "  itself  implies 
the  idea  of  an  imperfect  universe,  especially  if  it  means  not  a 
predictable  progress,  predetermined  by  Reason  and  Right- 
eousness and  circumscribed  by  divine  purpose,  but,  as  it  does  to 
the  modern  mind,  a  pragmatic  and  undefined  planetary  adven- 
ture. It  is  unfortunate  that  the  book  in  which  Mr.  Wells 
sustains  his  thesis  is  marred  by  a  caricature  of  Jewish  thought, 
and  still  more  regrettable  that  his  popularity  should  provide 
the  semi-illiterate  with  half-baked  knowledge.  His  work  thus 
demands  more  attention  than  the  unread  mis  judgments  of  the 
savants.  "  The  Invisible  King  " —  a  title  that  seems  borrowed 
from  the  first  pages  of  Seeley's  "  Ecce  Homo  " —  characterises 
the  Jewish  God  as  "  a  bickering  monopolist,"  "  a  malignant  and 
partisan  deity,  perpetually  '  upset '  by  the  little  things  people 
did  and  contriving  murder  and  vengeance,"  and  extraordinarily 
wrathful  at  "  this  or  that  little  dirtiness  or  breach  of  the  sexual 
tabu,"  and  even  "  burning  Sodom  or  Gomorrah."  One  wonders 
what  a  God  is  for,  if  He  is  to  say  nothing  about  conduct,  which 
is  half  of  life,  even  if  it  be  not  Matthew  Arnold's  "  three- 
fourths."  Or  is  it  that  He  is  to  concern  Himself  only  with 
other  people's  peccadilloes,  and  we  are  to 

"  Compound  for  sins  we  are  inclined  to 
By  damning  those  we  have  no  mind  to  "  ? 

Mr.  Wells  ought  to  have  remembered  that  the  sexual  tabus  in 
an  age  of  polygamy  were  not  what  they  are  now.     And  the 

49 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

Jehovah  of  Solomon  and  David  could  scarcely  therefore  be 
associated  with  a  joyless  Puritanism.  Yet  there  were  limits 
even  to  Old  Testament  tolerance.  Sodom  and  Gomorrah  were 
not  burnt  for  trivial  errors.  If  Isaiah's  invective  was  aroused, 
it  was  at  reactionary  abominations,  idolatries,  and  hideous 
cruelties: 

"  Are  ye  not  children  of  transgression, 
A  seed  of  falsehood? 
Yet  that  inflame  yourselves  among  the  terebinths  under  every 

leafy  tree, 
That  slay  the  children  in  the  valleys, 
Under  the  clefts  of  the  rocks  ?  " 

In  the  same  vein  Jeremiah  cried:  "  Will  ye  steal,  murder,  and 
commit  adultery,  and  swear  falsely,  and  offer  unto  Baal,  and 
walk  after  other  gods  whom  ye  have  not  known,  and  come  and 
stand  before  Me  in  this  house,  whereupon  my  name  is  called, 
and  say :  *  We  are  delivered,'  that  ye  may  do  all  these  abomi- 
nations?" Complaining  likewise  of  the  child-murderers,  he 
says :  "  And  they  have  built  the  high  places  of  Tophet,  which 
is  in  the  valley  of  the  son  of  Hinnom,  to  burn  their  sons  and 
their  daughters  in  the  fire ;  which  I  commanded  not,  neither 
came  it  into  My  mind." 

These  "  little  things  "  which  "  upset  Jehovah  "  are  scarcely 
the  way  to  "  the  Kingdom  of  God,"  of  which  Mr.  Wells  is  the 
eloquent  evangelist,  and  one  constituent  of  which  he  specificall}r 
defines  as  "  the  progressive  enlargement  and  development  of  the 
racial  life."  For,  as  Mr.  Wells  warms  to  his  theme,  we  learn 
to  our  surprise  that  his  own  "  Invisible  King  "  demands  nothing 
if  not  ethical  service.  For  him  clergymen  are  to  throw  up  their 
livings,  barristers  their  briefs.  "  It  is  plain  that  he  can  admit 
no  divided  control  of  the  world  he  claims.  He  concedes  nothing 
to  Caesar."  Evidently  then  "  a  monopolist,"  between  whom  and 
Jehovah  there  is  little  to  choose.  Samuel  himself  was  not  more 
jealously  republican  for  his  God,  than  Mr.  Wells  for  his. 
"  God  is  to  be  made  and  declared  the  head  of  the  world  "  and 
even  the  symbols  on  stamps  are  Use-iuajcstc.  And  when  we 
learn  that  the  future  is  not  to  democracy  but  theocracy,  and 
that  the  trinity  is  doomed,  we  arc  back  in  the  derided  Old  Tes- 
tament. The  fact  is,  that  Mr.  Wells  has  all  the  "  stigmata  " 
of  Hebrew  prophecy  —  lips  touched  with  the  burning  coal  can 
in  fact  speak  no  otherwise. 

50 


THE  VOICE  OF  JEKUSALEM 

When  Hebraism  thus  marks  a  man  for  its  own,  all  the  glib 
talk  of  reconciling  it  with  Hellenism  vanishes.  For  what  is 
Thought  divorced  from  action  but  Sterility,  and  what  is  Beauty 
but  the  by-product  of  the  quest  for  Good,  as  the  grace  of  a 
flower  is  born  of  its  energy  to  live?  Vanishes  too  all  that  tol- 
erance which  Mr.  Wells  earlier  displays  —  at  the  expense  of 
Judaism  —  for  "  the  many-handed  symbols  of  the  Hindu  or 
the  lacquered  idols  of  China." 

It  is  a  pity  that  this  noble  book  —  so  finely  felt  and  written 
that  its  thought  deserved  a  far  longer  gestation  —  should  not 
be  immune  from  the  general  incoherence  of  his  impatient  im- 
provisation. Mr.  Wells's  contributions  to  thought,  however 
weighty,  are  merely  Mr.  Wells  thinking  aloud,  and  stimulating 
as  it  is  to  watch  his  cerebral  processes,  I  am  always  reminded  of 
the  anecdote  in  my  school  physiology-book  of  the  doctor  who 
watched  a  patient's  digestive  processes  through  a  wound  in  his 
stomach. 

Mr.  Wells  even  unconsciously  accepts  in  principle  the  dietary 
and  sexual  regimen  of  Judaism,  which  in  an  earlier  chapter  is 
contumeliously  rejected.  For  "  the  believer  owes  all  his  being, 
and  every  moment  of  his  life  to  God,  to  keep  mind  and  body  as 
clean,  pure,  wholesome,  active,  and  completely  at  God's  service, 
as  he  can.  There  is  no  scope  for  indulgence  or  dissipation  in 
such  a  consecrated  life."  The  fact  that  in  orthodox  Judaism 
the  guidance  is  not  left  to  individual  ignorance  does  not  affect 
the  essence  of  the  conception,  which  has  been  illustrated  in 
contemporary  life  by  the  embargo  on  alcohol  in  America. 

The  sole  difference  between  Mr.  Wells's  God  and  the  ancient 
Hebrew's  —  as  that  God  was  apprehended  in  the  best  Semitic 
minds  —  is  that  Mr.  Wells's  God  is  finite.  In  His  unity,  invis- 
ibility or  incorporeality,  righteousness,  jealousy,  and  unre- 
served and  exclusive  claim  for  service,  He  is  identical  with  Je- 
hovah. And  it  is  extremely  interesting  to  witness  the  re-forma- 
tion of  ancient  conceptions  in  an  ultra-modern  mind.  Nor  is 
the  point  of  difference  of  supreme  importance,  for  it  is  merely 
metaphysical,  and  the  Hebrew  genius  in  its  palmy  days  had  —  I 
have  already  pointed  out  —  no  philosophy.  Sufficient  to  obey 
and  adore  the  unknowable  Creator.  Philosophy  whether  theo- 
logical or  atheistic  is  at  bottom  the  attempt  of  the  human  intel- 
lect to  circumscribe  that  which  circumscribes  it,  and  is  thus  a 
sort  of  Irish  bull  chasing  its  own  tail.  As  the  demi-Jew,  Mon- 
taigne, sagely  put  it :     "  Man  cannot  see  but  with  his  eyes  nor 

51 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

seize  but  with  his  power."     When  Amos  in  the  eighth  century 
b.c.  exclaimed: 

"  Seek  the  Lord,  and  live  — 
Him  that  maketh  the  Pleiades  and  Orion, 
And  bringeth  on  the  shadow  of  death  in  the  morning, 
And  darkeneth  the  day  into  night; 
That  calleth  for  the  waters  of  the  sea, 
And  poureth  them  out  upon  the  face  of  the  earth; 
The  Lord  is  His  name," 

the  prophet  could  not  separate  his  passion  for  righteousness 
from  the  cosmos,  feeling  that  the  same  God  created  both.  Mr. 
Wells,  equally  under  the  spell  of  a  powerful  emotion,  and  ex- 
pressing in  language  of  rare  beauty  that  conviction  of  sin  and 
that  sense  of  a  mission  which  are  common  to  all  converts  of 
genius  from  Paul  and  St.  Augustine  downwards,  must  needs  try 
to  rationalise  his  emotion  (which,  however,  is  a  "  surd  "  and 
cannot  be  rationalised).  Hence  his  heart  and  his  head  come 
into  conflict,  for  to  him  Nature  is  Fate,  the  veiled  Being,  and 
God  but  a  finite  struggler  in  the  welter ;  having  indeed  come  into 
existence  only  through  humanity  and  possessing  no  existence 
outside  ourselves.  Forced  to  choose  between  God's  omnipo- 
tence and  his  own  omniscience,  Mr.  Wells  opts  for  the  latter. 
We  hear  no  more  of  "  Scepticism  of  the  Instrument." 

It  is  the  third  person  of  the  trinity  —  what  the  old  Rabbis 
called  the  Ruach  Hakodesh  or  Holy  Ghost  —  succeeding  to  the 
throne  from  which  the  Son  had  already  ousted  the  Father. 
Mr.  Wells  seems  always  discovering  midi  a  quatorze  heures,  for 
this  conception,  even  if  the  twelfth-century  Joachim  of  Flora 
had  it  not  in  mind  when  he  said  "  the  Third  Kingdom  will  be 
the  Kingdom  of  the  Holy  Ghost,"  was  exhaustively  suggested 
and  examined  by  Mill  fifty  years  ago,  not  to  mention  its  re- 
discovery by  William  James.  It  is  a  conception  that  deserves 
serious  study,  but  it  would  seem  from  Mr.  Wells's  novel  about 
"  The  Soul  of  a  Bishop  "  that  he  has  already  "  moved  on."  He 
seems  kindlier  to  framers  of  Nicasan  and  other  creeds,  as  though 
now  perceiving  that  they,  too,  were  but  trying  to  rationalise 
surds  and  harmonise  incompatible  mysteries,  the  antinomies  of 
theology,  and  that  it  is  just  as  theologically  incomprehensible 
to  say  that  God  is  not  omnipotent  as  to  say  that  He  is. 

The  Athanasian  creed  holds  in  fact  no  darker  mystery  than 
his  hypothesis  of  a  universe  greater  than  God,  or  a  God  who 

52 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

would  be  snuffed  out  if  mankind  accidentally  perished  or  de- 
stroyed itself,  as  is  not  utterly  out  of  the  question  by  the 
methods  of  modern  warfare.  Mr.  Wells  might  almost  cry  with 
Tertullian,  certum  est  quia  impossibile  est.  In  what  magnifi- 
cent contrast  rings  the  assurance  of  the  opening  words  of  Gen- 
esis :  "  In  the  beginning  God  created  the  heaven  and  the 
earth."  Mr.  Wells  is  really  a  modern  Mani,  for  whom  Ormuzd 
and  Ahriman  are  the  factors  of  existence,  and  what  he  is  break- 
ing himself  against  is  the  old  problem  of  the  nature  of  evil,  and 
the  old  antinomy  of  whether  a  beneficent  God  could  have  cre- 
ated it.  Isaiah  with  sublime  boldness  utters  that  "  everlasting 
Yes  "  which  is  the  keynote  of  Judaism. 

"  I  am  the  Lord  and  there  is  none  else. 
I   form  the  light  and  create  darkness. 
I  make  peace  and  create  evil. 
I  am  the  Lord." 

Thus,  as  in  that  great  line  of  Goethe, 

"  Ueber  alien  Gipfeln  ist  Ruh'." 

It  is  the  same  note  that  we  find  in  Spinoza  —  the  mystical 
loving  acceptance  of  the  All  as  the  expression  of  the  One  —  or 
that  Mr.  Claude  G.  Montefiore  repeats  in  his  more  balancing 
fashion: 

"  I  can  have  faith  that  the  good  and  wise  God  has  his  own 
adequate  solution  of  evil  and  suffering,  but  that  a  godless  world 
produced  goodness  and  knowledge,  reason  and  love  —  this  I  cannot 
believe  at  all."  1 

Isaiah,  who,  in  the  same  chapter,  is  hailing  Cyrus  the  Persian 
as  the  subduer  of  nations  and  the  redeemer  of  Israel,  was  doubt- 
less intent  on  combating  the  dualism  of  Zoroaster,  that  pioneer 
of  Manichasism.  It  is  in  this  spirit  that  Cyrus  is  represented 
as  Jehovah's  instrument,  though  the  conqueror  be  unconscious 
who  has  girded  him,  and  that  per  contra  in  another  passage  of 

i  Perhaps  the  most  illuminating  recent  contribution  to  this  puzzle  of  the 
ages  has  been  made  by  "Wayfarer"  in  The  Nation:  "Man  in  war  pur- 
sues a  negative  end  with  the  greatest  possible  cruelty  of  method.  Nature, 
on  the  other  hand,  follows  a  creative  purpose  and  employs  the  minimum  of 
harm  necessary  for  its  achievement."  The  thought  seems  akin  to  that  in 
one  of  my  earliest  verses: 

"  And  if  the  earth  with  endless  fray  is  rife, 
Acknowledge  in  the  universal  strife 
The  zest  of  this,  the  seed  of  higher,  life." 
53 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Isaiah  Jehovah  is  asked  why  He  allowed  His  servants  to  err 
from  His  ways  and  hardened  their  hearts.  Mr.  Wells,  in  his 
niggling  criticism  of  Jehovah,  urges  that  the  true  God  has  no 
scorn  or  hatred  for  those  who  seek  Him  through  idols.  The 
poet,  Ibn  Gabirol,  proclaimed  in  1050,  that  age  of  Christian 
intolerance  —  and  the  passage  found  its  way  into  the  Seph- 
ardic  prayer-book  — 

"  Yet   is   not    Thy   glory   diminished    by   reason    of    those    that 
worship  aught  beside  Thee, 
For  the  yearning  of  them  all  is  to  draw  nigh  Thee. 
But  they  are  like  the  blind, 

Setting  their  faces  forward  on  the  King's  highway, 
Yet  still  wandering  from  the  path." 

Indeed  already  in  various  passages  of  Deuteronomy  the  gods 
of  the  heathen  are  conceived  as  "  allotted  "  to  them  by  Jehovah, 
while  Malachi,  who  stood  at  the  cradle  of  Judaism  proper,  pro- 
tests that  offerings  throughout  the  world  to  whomsoever  pre- 
sented are  really  presented  to  him. 

It  is  some  consolation  for  vacillating  views  to  be  told  by 
Isaiah  that  it  is  this  omnific  Jehovah  "  that  turneth  wise  men 
backwards  and  maketh  their  knowledge  foolish,"  so  that  we 
may  piously  look  forward  to  further  volte-face  from  our  light- 
ning philosopher,  in  the  confidence  that  when  we  have  watched 
the  panorama  of  history  passing  —  at  cinema  speed  —  through 
Mr.  Wells's  brain,  we  are  destined  to  witness  yet  other  exhibi- 
tions of  his  cerebration  in  the  very  act.  But  however  much  I 
am  put  off  by  Mr.  Wells's  precipitate  parturition,  I  recognise 
with  Swift  in  "  A  Tale  of  a  Tub  "  that  in  the  labours  of  the 
brain,  as  of  the  body,  "  going  too  long  is  a  cause  of  abortion 
as  effectual,  though  not  so  frequent,  as  going  too  short."  Mr. 
Wells  —  it  is  the  bravest  deed  I  ever  saw  —  has  dashed  off 
that  "  History  of  Human  Error  "  which  Mr.  Casaubon  was  too 
learned  ever  to  be  delivered  of.  And  if  he  is  always  in  a  jour- 
nalistic hurry  unworthy  of  so  great  a  writer,  he  has  escaped 
those  other  darling  sins  of  the  age,  pettiness  or  preciosity. 
Though  the  young  generation  which  once  gave  him  its  most 
gorgeous  epithet  "  dionysiac  " —  its  O.M. —  can  no  longer  ac- 
claim him  of  its  amoral  crew,  and  the  optimism  of  his  "  Outline 
of  History  "  amuses,  as  I  gather,  the  super-cultured  denizens 
of  "  the  ivory  tower,"  that  work  remains  a  magnificent  dynamic 
in   an   age   not   unintelligibly    anaemic.     While  pococurantism, 

54 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

pessimism  and  Dadaism  have  not  unnaturally  found  nourish- 
ment in  the  spectacle  mankind  has  been  making  of  itself,  these 
superior  souls,  unless  they  lend  a  hand  to  the  establishment  of  a 
sane  civilisation,  may  find  their  ivory  tower  blown  to  the  four 
winds  by  a  bomb  from  a  literal  super-man  in  his  higher  plane. 

Mr.  Wells  has  written  Tendenz-geschichte  in  the  good  old  He- 
braic fashion,  judging  freely  and  reading  us  contemporary  les- 
sons by  way  of  the  Punic  Wars,  the  Athenian  mob,  the  Roman 
Empire,  or  any  old  stick  that  comes  handy  to  beat  us  withal. 
There  is  none  of  that  artistic  aloofness  which  has  demanded 
the  correction  of  Bible  history  by  the  point  of  view  of  the 
arraigned.  There  is  more  of  the  spirit  of  Lord  Acton.  To 
know  all  is  not  to  blur  all.  Mr.  Wells  avoids  that  affectation 
which  I  once  satirised  in  a  mock  Ode  to  Jezebel. 

"  Cultured  Baalite,  loyal  wife, 

Jezebel, 
Partner  in  a  noble  strife, 

Jezebel. 
Protestant  for  light  and  sweetness 
'Gainst  the  narrow  incompleteness 
Of  Elijah  and  Elisha's  view  of  life." 

In  Mr.  Wells's  conception  of  all  human  history  as  the  striv- 
ings of  a  young  immortal  to  find  himself,  in  his  suggested  par- 
allel between  its  blunderings  and  gropings  and  those  of  the  in- 
dividual slowly  reaching  his  true  happiness  and  life-work,  he 
has  hit  out  a  larger  analogy  than  literature  had  yet  given  us. 
Whether  it  fits  the  facts  or  not,  it  is  a  great  imaginative  syn- 
thesis. 

Nor  ought  I  to  complain  that  Mr.  Wells's  thought  has 
"  moved  on  "  yet  once  more  —  it  is  like  a  muddy  stream  that 
purifies  itself  by  force  of  going  on  —  for  he  has  now  grown  to 
understand  the  breadth  of  Jewish  theology  better,  as  well  as 
the  value  of  a  "  jealous  "  Jehovah.  "  Neither  Gautama  nor 
Lao  Tse  nor  Confucius  had  any  inkling  of  this  idea  of  a  jealous 
God,  a  God  who  would  have  '  none  other  gods,'  a  God  of  terrible 
Truth,  who  would  not  tolerate  any  lurking  belief  in  magic, 
witchcraft,  or  old  customs,  or  any  sacrificing  to  the  god-king 
or  any  trifling  with  the  stern  unity  of  things.  The  intolerance 
of  the  Jewish  mind  did  keep  its  essential  faith  clear  and  clean." 
And  again :  "  We  have  already  noted  the  want  of  any  progres- 
sive idea  in  primitive  Buddhism.     In  that  again  it  contrasted 

55 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

with  Judaism.  The  idea  of  a  Promise  gives  to  Judaism  a  qual- 
ity no  previous  or  contemporary  religion  displayed;  it  made 
Judaism  historical  and  dramatic.  It  justified  its  fierce  intol- 
erance because  it  pointed  to  an  aim.  .  .  .  Because  of  its  per- 
suasion of  a  promise  and  of  a  divine  leadership  to  serve  divine 
ends,  it  remained  in  comparison  with  Buddhism  bright  and  ex- 
pectant, like  a  cared-for  sword." 

Oddly  enough,  it  is  only  when  contrasting  Judaism  with 
Buddhism  or  Hellenism  or  with  the  doctrines  of  Lao  Tse  or 
Confucius  that  Mr.  Wells  is  able  to  appreciate  its  claims  to  be 
the  one  sane  central  religion  of  humanity ;  when  compared  with 
Mohammedanism  or  Christianity  it  is  accused  of  exclusiveness, 
of  making  "  a  racial  hoard  of  God."  He  seems  in  Part  XIV. 
already  to  have  forgotten  what  he  wrote  in  Part  VI.  of  how  in 
Babylon  "  2,400  years  ago  the  ideas  of  the  moral  unity  of  man- 
kind, of  a  world-peace,  had  come  into  the  world,"  or  in  Part 
IX.  apropos  of  Buddha  that  "  the  idea  of  mankind  as  a  great 
Brotherhood  pursuing  an  endless  destiny  under  the  God  of 
Righteousness,  the  idea  that  was  already  dawning  upon  the 
Semitic  consciousness  in  Babylon  at  this  time,  did  not  exist  in 
his  world."  Before  anyone  talks  of  the  Jew  making  "  a  racial 
hoard  of  God,"  he  should  read  Zechariah  ii.  11 :  "  And  many 
nations  shall  join  themselves  to  the  Lord  in  that  day,  and  shall 
be  My  people."  And  Zechariah  belongs  to  the  very  epoch  of 
the  Jewish  Restoration  from  Babylon,  the  birth  of  Judaism 
proper. 

It  is  true  enough  that  in  its  Dark  Ages,  Judaism  has  been 
exclusive,  but  these  were  the  ages  when  it  was  shut  in  Ghettos 
by  Christendom,  and  conversion  to  Judaism  was  punishable 
with  death,  both  for  the  convert  and  the  missionary.  And  in  so 
far  as  the  Jew  is  himself  responsible  for  this  narrowness,  he 
has  not  so  much  made  "  a  racial  hoard  of  God  "  as  a  godly 
hoard  of  race.  Lacking  the  territory  that  automatically  con- 
serves other  races,  his  instinct  has  been  to  preserve  himself. 
And  if  his  instinct  gave  itself  for  conscious  reason  that  he  was 
an  irreplaceable  medium  for  truths  precious  to  all,  the  reason 
was  not  so  groundless.  Mr.  Wells  who  recognises  how  in- 
famously the  nations  have  betrayed  "Christian  universalism  " 
in  the  last  war,  should  not  single  out  "  Jewish  exclusiveness," 
which  after  all  was  not  militant.  I  am  afraid  that  it  is  not 
only  re  Greek  history  that  Mr.  Wells  needs  the  correction  of- 
fered him  by  Professor  Murray  for  judging  ancient  peoples 

56 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

without  comparing  them  with  their  co-existing  peoples,  much  as 
Mark  Twain's  Yankee  judged  the  Court  of  King  Arthur.  By 
the  comparative,  the  only  true,  standard,  Judaea  will  in  some 
particulars  surpass  Greece  and  Rome,  even  the  Rome  of  the 
Vatican ;  not  to  mention  the  great  Oriental  Empires  with  those 
vast  palaces  beside  which  Solomon's  was  "  a  suburban  villa." 

The  best  thought  of  Judam  was  never  exclusive  in  theory. 
And  in  practice,  well  we  know  —  as  the  greatest  and  narrowest 
living  poet  puts  it  — 

"  God  gave  all  men  all  earth  to  love, 
But  since  our  hearts  are  small, 
Ordained  for  each  one  spot  should  prove 
Beloved  over  all." 

For  the  Jew  Judasa  was  beloved  over  all :  he  did  not  wish  to  be 
lost  in  the  mass  of  mankind  —  has  not  George  Eliot  pointed  out 
how  many  virtues  draw  root  from  "  the  sense  of  special  be- 
longing"?—  but  he  commended  the  God  of  Israel  to  all  men 
and  bade  them  make  Him  also  the  God  of  their  respective  Zions, 
as  he  to-day  would  endorse  Blake's  resolve  to  build  Jerusalem 
"  in  England's  green  and  pleasant  land." 

Assuredly  nobody  is  working  harder  to  build  Jerusalem 
everywhere  than  Mr.  Wells,  who  follows  up  his  pained  recog- 
nition of  the  national  deities  —  the  idealised  England,  France, 
or  Germany  —  which  Christendom  is  now  engaged  in  worship- 
ping, by  a  passage  of  marvellous  beauty. 

"  Yet  in  the  background  of  the  consciousness  of  the  world,  waiting 
as  the  silence  and  moonlight  wait  above  the  flares  and  shouts,  the 
hurdy-gurdies  and  quarrels  of  a  village  fair,  is  the  knowledge  that 
all  mankind  is  one  brotherhood,  that  God  is  the  universal  and 
impartial  Father  of  mankind,  and  that  only  in  that  universal  service 
can  mankind  find  peace,  or  peace  be  found  for  the  troubles  of  the 
individual  soul  .  .   ." 

The  unmitigated  Hebraism  of  this  passage  —  the  stock  re- 
frain of  the  Synagogue  —  is  repeated  in  the  comparison  with 
Hellenism. 

"  The  mind  of  the  Hebrews  awoke  suddenly  to  the  endless  mis- 
eries and  disorders  of  life,  saw  that  these  miseries  and  disorders 
were  largely  due  to  the  lawless  acts  of  men,  and  concluded  that 
salvation  could  come  only  through  subduing  ourselves  to  the  service 
of  the  one  God  who  rules  heaven  and  earth." 

57 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Had  Mr.  Wells  acknowledged  consistently  and  without  reser- 
vations and  discounts  —  as  Huxley  did  —  that  this  is  the  bur- 
den of  Hebrew  prophecy  and  the  hope  of  Israel,  the  "  Outline  " 
of  his  history  would  have  been  still  more  accurately  drawn. 
But  it  seems  impossible  for  even  Mr.  Wells  to  shake  off  the  snob- 
bery of  modern  historians  who,  instead  of  following,  if  in  a 
modern  interpretation,  Bossuet's  centralisation  of  Jewish  his- 
tory, cannot  bear  to  give  pride  of  place  to  so  lowly  a  clan, 
despised  and  rejected  of  men.  They  are  like  Pontius  Pilate  in 
Anatole  France's  story,  who  could  not  recall  Jesus.  Yet  the 
Lord  who  was  not  in  the  rending  wind  of  Assyria,  nor  in  the 
earthquake  of  Babylon,  nor  in  the  fire  of  Rome,  may  be  in  the 
still  small  voice  of  Jerusalem. 


X 

It  is  in  the  chapter  on  the  rise  of  Christianity  that  Mr.  Wells 
shows  himself  least  able  to  override  his  conscious  prejudice 
against  Judaism  and  his  unconscious  prejudice  in  favour  of 
Christianity.  Like  most  modern  thinkers,  he  makes  up  for  the 
denial  of  divinity  to  Jesus  by  divinising  his  doctrine  and  his  life, 
and  compensates  for  the  repudiation  of  the  "  immaculate  con- 
ception "  of  the  Virgin  by  the  acceptance  of  her  son  as  immac- 
ulate. Similarly  Renan,  though  he  permits  himself  a  Browning- 
esque  analysis  of  the  semi-illuded,  semi-illuding  psychology  of 
Jesus  at  the  moment  the  man  of  Nazareth  was  turning  into  the 
popularly  expected  Messiah,  bom  in  Bethlehem  of  royal  seed, 
yet  dares  to  predict  that  no  son  of  man  will  ever  surpass  him. 
Jewish  thought,  which  impartially  records  the  sins  of  Moses 
and  David,  knows  no  such  human  perfection.  Tolstoi,  our  lat- 
ter-day Christian  Saint,  was  a  converted  roue  who  still  gave 
Gorki  the  impression  of  broadness  in  talk,  without  destroying, 
however,  even  for  this  sceptical  modern,  a  strange  radiation  of 
divinity.  And  such  storm-flecked  spirituality  is  doubtless  the 
general  nature  of  religious  geniuses. 

The  American  Rabbi,  Endow,  whose  "  Jewish  View  of  Jesus  " 
is  the  latest  and  not  the  least  commendable  contribution  of  the 
Synagogue  to  this  vexed  question,  is  as  uncritical  at  bottom  as 
Wells  or  Renan.  If  only  Christendom  will  concede  the  human- 
ity of  Christ,  Judam  will  concede  his  immaculacy.1     But  these 

i  In  his  sermons  on  "  The  Adequacy  of  Judaism,"  Rabbi  Enelow  does, 
however,  expound  the  inadequacy  of  Jesus. 

58 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

eirenica,  however  welcome,  are  no  true  contributions  to  philos- 
ophy or  psychology,  and  there  is  more  flesh  and  blood  in  Mr. 
Shaw's  portrait  of  Christ  as  exhibited  in  his  preface  to  "  An- 
drocles,"  though  even  here  the  presentation  of  Jesus  as  a  less 
scientific  Shaw  tends   subtly  to   the  conventional  immaculacy. 
And  if  Mr.  Shaw's  Jesus  resembles  the  author  of  "  Man  and 
Superman,"  there  is  a  suspicious  similarity  between  Mr.  Wells's 
own  Gospel  and  his  reading  of  Christ's,  as  though  Christ  too 
believed  in  a  Father  of  limited  power.     Nor  is  there  a  word  of 
admission   as    to   the   impracticability   of   the   Sermon    on   the 
Mount,  which  even  Bishops  have  recognised,  or  any  suggestion 
that  this  unworkability  of  the  Christian  ethics  may  be  due  to 
their  having  been  eschatological ;  interim-ethics,  as  the  Germans 
say,  pending  the  end  of  the  world,  believed   to  be   at  hand. 
Christ's  followers  were  to  be  "  the  salt  of  the  earth,"  but  unless 
the  earth  is  to  pass  away  soon,  a  world  all  salt  might  be  a  great 
salt  desert.      Ethics  is  not  aesthetics,  and  maxims  that  will  not 
work  are  no  more  useful  than  gold  knives  that  cannot  cut  or 
silver  pens   that  will  not  write.     As  Mr.   Wells   sees   clearly 
enough  in  the  case  of  Buddha,  renunciation  of  or  withdrawal 
from  the  world  is  no  solution  of  man's  life-problem,  however 
"  beautiful  and  consoling  "  these  "  systems  of  evasion,"  nor  can 
sane  guidance  be  expected  from  any  teacher  who  though  he 
has  a  Father  in  heaven  has  no  son  on  earth,  or  who  deserts 
him  when  he  has  one,  as  Buddha  did.     Mankind  has  its  own  way 
of  equilibrating  itself  to  these  Brands  with  their  insistence  on 
all  or  nothing,  and  by  combining  the  rejection  of  their  wilder 
teachings  with  the  apotheosis  of  their  persons,  offers  a  prac- 
tical criticism  of  their  merits  and  limitations.     They  uphold 
the  ideal  in  a  large  ostensive  form,  and  humanity  offers  it  every 
homage  but  that  of  adoption.     And  it  is  often  not  unfortunate 
that  the  adoration  remains  Platonic.     For  the  inhuman  is  con- 
founded with  the  superhuman.     It  may  be  true  that  "  High 
hopes  faint  on  a  warm  hearth-stone,"  but  as  a  general  substi- 
tute for  the  fifth  commandment  the  behaviour  of  Jesus  to  the 
future  Madonna  cannot  be  commended.     It  has  all  the  ruthless 
logic  of  a  Lenin.     And  humanity  in  glorifying  his  mother  and 
imaging    him    so    pertinaciously    in    her    arms    has    ironically 
avenged  her.     When  Mr.  Wells  cannily  throws  us  as  a  conclu- 
sion :     "  To  this  day  this  Galilean  is  too  much  for  our  small 
hearts,"  I  feel  that  here  at  least  our  hearts  are  larger  than  that 
of  the  Galilean.     That  Mr.  Wells  should  thus  call  him  a  Gali- 

59 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

lean,  and  never  once  lapse  into  calling  him  a  Jew,  is  typical,  for 
he  admires  Jesus  as  a  man  after  his  own  heart,  and  it  is  only  for 
the  Nietzscheans  who  repudiate  him  that  Jesus  is  of  the  ab- 
horred race.  Perhaps  the  remark  which  gives  Mr.  Wells  most 
room  to  change  his  mind  again  is  that  "  the  Jews  have  persisted 
as  a  people  while  Hellenism  has  become  a  universal  light  for 
mankind."  The  truth  surely  is  that  Judaism  has  both  per- 
sisted as  a  people  and  become  a  universal  light  through  its  Old 
and  New  Testament,  exactly  as  Hellenism  has  done  through  its 
literature  and  art.  Hellenism  has,  up  to  a  point,  also  persisted 
as  a  people,  and  I  do  not  doubt  but  that  Venizelos  feels  his  kin- 
ship with  Pericles.  Moreover,  if  Hellenism  is  such  an  all-suf- 
ficing light,  why  all  this  pother  of  Mr.  Wells's  private  evangel? 

It  is,  however,  in  not  escaping  the  conventional  pitfalls  anent 
the  Pharisees,  that  the  Christian  chapter  of  Mr.  Wells's  "  His- 
tory "  reads  most  oldfashioned.  While  the  lower  clement  of 
Jewish  thought  may  have  looked  upon  God  as  "  a  bargainer," 
or  the  Messianic  hope  as  militarist,  it  is  unfair,  even  in  such  an 
"  Outline,"  to  present  this  mentality  as  the  exclusive  antithesis 
to  that  of  Jesus,  who,  after  all,  found  all  his  disciples,  apostles 
and  reporters  among  his  fellow-Jews.  If  their  smaller  souls 
misunderstood  him,  as  Mr.  Wells,  like  Matthew  Arnold,  con- 
tends, he  was  also  sufficiently  ambiguous  in  his  personal  claim  to 
awaken  apprehensions  of  blasphemy  against  the  one  sole  God. 
It  is  obviously  false  to  represent  the  Sadducees  (in  opposition 
to  the  Pharisees)  as  the  generous  sect,  "  ready  to  accept  pros- 
elytes and  so  to  share  God  and  his  promise  with  all  mankind," 
when  it  was  in  his  very  rebuke  to  the  Pharisees  that  Jesus  said, 
"  Ye  compass  sea  and  land  to  make  one  proselyte."  Moreover 
does  not  John  the  Baptist  confound  both  Sadducees  and  Phari- 
sees in  a  common  vituperation? 

After  Kuenen's  tribute  to  the  Pharisees,  after  Wellhausen 
has  called  them  "  the  virtuosi  of  religion,"  and  Mr.  Travers 
Herford  has  taught  the  world  Avhat  it  owes  to  them,  it  is  dis- 
appointing that  even  a  thinker  of  Mr.  Wells's  magnanimity 
cannot  shake  off  early  prepossessions.  We  shall  never  get  the 
future  straight  until  wc  disentangle  the  past  without  bias. 

It  is  true  that  the  Mosaic  code  has  six  hundred  and  thh'tccn 
precepts.  But  Hillel  was  a  Doctor  of  the  Law  at  Jerusalem  un- 
der Herod,  and  his  summary  of  them  in  a  negatively-expressed 
version  of  the  Golden  Rule  is  well-known.  Nor  is  the  Talmud 
lacking  in  indications  that  it  was  the  spirit  behind  them  that 

60 


THE  VOICE  OF  JEKUSALEM 

was  really  regarded.  Habakkuk,  it  tells  us,  had  reduced  them 
to  one:  "The  just  shall  live  by  faith,"  while  a  rival  Amora 
taught  that  their  final  condensation  was  the  phrase  from  Amos : 
"  Seek  the  Lord  and  live."  Either  summary  might  quite  well 
express  Mr.  Wells's  own  gospel  or  even  that  of  Jesus.  The 
inner  truth  of  Pharisaism  is  that  it  was  not  less  broad  than 
its  phylacteries.  Their  amplitude  was  but  an  overflowing  of 
the  spirit.  As  Captain  Herbert  Adler  says  so  well  of  the  Sab- 
bath of  the  Pharisees,  it  was  essentially  "  not  a  thing  of  nega- 
tions. As  little  could  it  be  observed  by  mere  abstentions  as  a 
poem  can  be  composed  by  the  avoidance  of  false  quantities." 
And  he  points  in  proof  to  the  Synagogue  Liturgy  passim.  On 
the  Day  of  Atonement  for  example  "  the  bare  act  of  fasting  is 
hardly  referred  to."  Spurious  Pharisees  are,  of  course,  always 
with  us.  But  it  is  an  ancient  Rabbi  who  enumerates  their  six 
species :  "  Pharisee  Self-seeker,  Pharisee  Shambler,  Pharisee 
Reckoner  (who  is  always  balancing  his  heavenly  pass-book), 
Pharisee  Bent-Back,  Pharisee  Do-tell-me-another-Duty,  and 
Pharisee  Tremulous,"  while  the  only  true  Pharisee  is  styled 
"  Pharisee  Love-God." 


XI 

These  six  hundred  and  thirteen  precepts  of  the  Mosaic  code, 
though  they  doubtless  embrace  some  survivals  of  primitive 
tabus  and  totems,  are  in  the  main  only  an  attempt  at  a  prac- 
tical idealism,  a  sanctified  sociology,  an  order  in  human  affairs, 
which  no  one  has  demanded  with  more  insistence  —  even  unto 
pedantry  and  Philistinism  —  than  Mr.  Wells  himself.  In  a 
sermon  just  to  hand  from  Dr.  Walter  Walsh,  the  freest  of  all 
the  advanced  preachers,  I  find  —  and  curiously  enough  in  a 
discourse  called  "  Radical  Religious  Reform  " —  a  complaint 
against  people  who  "  pride  themselves  on  their  ideals  —  a  word 
they  are  particularly  fond  of  —  but  make  no  serious  effort  to 
get  them  reduced  to  laws  of  human  conduct;  laws  to  dominate 
Church  and  State  and  market  and  factory  and  school."  There 
is  in  fact  no  real  contradiction  between  the  spirit  and  a  letter 
which  codifies  it  for  practical  purposes  and  for  the  guidance  of 
spiritual  minors.  No  honest  man  objects  to  the  making  of 
laws  to  restrain  rogues,  fools,  and  infants.  The  spirit  that  is 
come  of  age  will  autonomously  do  what  the  immature  spirit  has 
to  be  commanded  to  do,  as  a  gentleman  will  without  thinking 

61 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

behave  as  etiquette  books  must  teach  the  boor.      The  genius 
may  play  the  piano  to  ravishment,  but  in  common  with  the 
musical  dullard  he  must  stick  to  the  notes  of  the  text.     The 
law  is  a  minimum,  like  the  poor  rate:  there  is  nothing  to  pre- 
vent any  man  from  giving  to  the  poor  all  he  hath.      Christen- 
dom did  not  really  enjoy  a  religion  of  the  spirit,  with  nothing 
of  the  Law,  and  if  it  shed  the  Law  at  all,  it  was  to  receive  it 
back  into  another  department  of  life.      The  difference  between 
it  and  Judaism  from  a  practical  standpoint  has  always  seemed 
to  me  summarised  in  the  reply  of  Jesus  to  those  who  enquired 
whether  it  was  lawful  to  pay  tribute  to  Caesar.     "  Render  unto 
Caesar  the  things  that  are  Caesar's  and  unto  God  the  things  that 
are  God's."     With  a  rare  unanimity  Matthew,  Mark  and  Luke 
relate  this  as  a  dexterous  retort  by  which  Jesus  evaded  being 
caught  by  his  foes  (though  there  appears  to  be  no  reason  why 
a  divine  personage  bent  on  self-immolation  should  have  exer- 
cised such  prudence).     But  the  reply  really  throws  over  the 
distinctive  feature  of  theocracy.     As  Mr.  Wells  rightly  claims, 
there  are  no  things  that  belong  to  Caesar  that  may  not  equally 
belong  to  God.      And  so  Judaism  has  no  separate  politics,  civ- 
ics, economics,  or  even  dietetics  and  hygiene.      Hence  the  pop- 
ular delusion  about  Pharisaism  or  Jewish  legalism.      The  Chris- 
tian imagines  that  it  was  a  burden  added  to  life  as  he  himself 
lived  it.     But  it  was  not  added  to  life  —  it  teas  life.      It  took  in 
the  whole  life.     What  for  the  modern  world  is  done  by  Law, 
Medicine,  Sanitation,  Philosophy,  Art,  etc.,  was  done  for  the 
ancient  or  mediaeval  Jew  by  his  Religion.     Hence  the  apparent 
superfluity  of  much  of  Mediaeval  Judaism,  now  that  the  Jew 
holds   shares   in   the   common   stock   of   European    civilisation. 
Instead  of  the  Rabbi  legislating  for  the  whole  of  life,  there  is 
the  British  Medical  Association  to  teach  hygiene,  the  House  of 
Commons  to  regulate  public  duty,  etc.,  etc.      I  am  not  certain 
that  this  specialisation  is  an  unmixed  good,  it  disintegrates  the 
unity  of  life  and  makes  religion  a  mere  aspect  among  many 
others  and  one  specially  suitable,  like  best  clothes,  for  highdays 
and  holidays,  though  it  seems  an  inevitable  phase  in  the  evolu- 
tion of  civilisation.      But  we  no  more  escape  legalism  because  we 
give  up  Talmudic  legalism  than  we  escape  war  because  we  have 
<^i\«n  up  chain-armour.      Beside  the  countless  pages  of  Black- 
stone  and  our  parliamentary  enactments,  beside  the  innumerable 
volumes  on  Equity,  Contracts,  Bankruptcy,  or  Military  Law, 
beside  the  libraries  of  leading  cases  and   that  "  wilderness  of 

62 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

single  instances  "  which  Tennyson  bewails,  Jewish  law  hides  its 
diminished  head.  D.O.R.A.  alone  is  bigger  than  the  Shul- 
chan  Aruch.  Indeed  Gentile  life  — -  or,  shall  we  say,  Gentility 
—  is  far  more  hide-bound  than  Pharisaism.  The  most  fashion- 
able Jew,  who  prides  himself  on  his  emancipation,  is  as  much  the 
slave  of  tradition  as  the  Ghetto  zealot.  I  take  up  a  pre-war 
book  on  etiquette  and  read: 

"  Cards  must  be  left  on  all  occasions  of  a  formal  character.  A 
lady  leaves  her  own  and  two  of  her  husband's  —  one  is  intended  for 
the  gentleman  of  the  house,  and  the  other  for  the  lady.  If  a  call  is 
made  upon  a  guest  staying  at  the  house,  a  card  is  also  left  for  her. 
A  lady  when  leaving  cards  for  her  husband,  must  place  them  upon 
the  hall  table,  and  not  leave  them  in  the  drawing-room  on  her  depar- 
ture, as  was  the  custom.  Should  the  lady  upon  whom  you  call  not 
be  at  home,  you  turn  down  one  corner  of  the  cards,  which  signifies 
that  you  have  called  personally,  and  on  the  whole  family.  Cards 
with  enquiries  should  be  left  at  the  door;  the  post  is  a  permissible 
channel  for  the  transmission  of  these,  where  the  distance  is  incon- 
veniently great." 

This  is  the  very  language  of  the  Rabbis.  I  almost  hear  the 
sing-song  and  see  the  scoop  of  the  inverted  expository  thumb. 
What  Bayswater  or  Kensington  lady  —  Christian  or  Jewess  — 
would  have  dared  to  infringe  that? 

And  if  the  Rabbis  multiplied  ordinances  praeter  nee  es  sit  at  em, 
they  were  swayed  not  by  a  mechanical  formalism,  but  by  a  liv- 
ing emotion.  As  the  sons  of  a  beloved  father  will  try  to  under- 
stand and  fulfil  the  minutest  shade  of  his  testamentary  disposi- 
tions, so  the  Rabbis  tried  to  read  between  the  lines  of  the  "  Eth- 
ical Will  "  which  the  Torah  was  to  them ;  to  be  more  legal  than 
the  Law,  to  give  no  grudging  joyless  service,  but  full  measure, 
pressed  down  and  running  over.  Though  the  deductive  logic 
by  which  "  Thou  shalt  not  seethe  a  kid  in  its  mother's  milk  " 
leads  to  the  cumbrous  ritual  of  Fleischig  and  Milchig,  is  absurd 
to  the  eye  of  pure  reason,  its  mainspring  was  not  logic  but  lov- 
ing loyalty.  There  is  even  something  to  be  said  for  the  "  legal 
fictions  "  which,  corrosive  of  conscience  as  they  were,  were  prob- 
ably meant  to  show  that  the  unavoidable  breach  of  law  in  a  dif- 
ficult world  did  not  mean  repudiation  of  the  Law.  If  we  do  not 
look  at  faiths  and  ideas  from  within,  from  the  point  of  view  of 
those  who  hold  them,  we  shall  never  understand  how  beliefs,  that 
to  the  impersonal  reason  are  transparent  absurdities,  may  yet 

63 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

be  capable  of  a  valuable  regulative  function  when  vitalised  in 
persons.  The  obverse  mistake  is  to  expect  persons,  for  whom 
ideas  are  dead,  to  be  vitalised  by  them. 

XII 

Thus,  for  the  Hebrew,  life  like  its  Creator,  was  a  unity. 
Lord  Acton  strangely  regards  the  maxim  "  Render  unto  Caesar 
the  things  that  are  Caesar's  "  as  asserting  and  denning  once 
for  all  the  province  of  ecclesiastical  liberty  in  the  face  of  the 
State,  while  Mr.  Wells  understands  it  as  meaning  that  prac- 
tically nothing  could  be  left  to  Caesar.  It  seems  to  me  on  the 
contrary  to  surrender  to  Caesar  a  good  deal  that  is  God's,  or 
at  least  to  contain  no  definition  of  the  rival  realms.  How 
would  Lord  Acton  have  met,  for  example,  the  Quaker  objection 
to  conscription,  which  Mr.  Wells  flippantly  dismisses  as  skin- 
saving?  The  life  of  society  is  surely  not  to  be  thus  bisected 
without  injury,  like  some  low  organism:  it  cannot  be  divided 
between  God  and  Caesar.  Indeed  this  very  reply  which  Jesus 
gave  to  his  tempters,  this  apparently  dexterous  repartee,  con- 
tained its  own  confutation.  For  the  coin  in  which  the  tribute 
to  Caesar  was  paid,  bore,  according  to  his  own  statement,  the 
image  of  Caesar.  Now  this  was  utterly  counter  to  the  second 
commandment  of  the  Decalogue.  No  Hebrew  coin  was  ever 
stamped  with  an  animal  or  human  device ;  there  is  none  on  the 
shekel  of  the  first  century,  nor  the  bronze  coins  of  Herod,  nor 
on  the  brass  coins  of  Bar  Cochba.  Hence  in  circulating  such 
tribute-money  the  Jew  was  committing  sin.  We  may  regard 
the  second  commandment  as  trivial,  and  it  has  certainly  lost 
much  of  its  point  with  the  diminution  of  idolatry,  though  the 
ikons  of  the  Greek  Church  and  the  crucifixes  and  pictures  of 
the  Roman  still  illustrate  its  wisdom.  But  in  days  when  the 
vulture  and  the  serpent  were  goddesses  in  Egypt,  and  apotheosis 
was  the  conventional  ending  of  a  Caesar,  the  line  between  repre- 
sentation and  worship  was  dangerously  narrow.  And  that  the 
worship  of  human  gods  was  no  shadowy  sentiment  or  Platonic 
devotion  to  some  ideal  imaginatively  incarnated,  may  be  seen 
from  the  extraordinary  story  in  Josephus  of  how  a  beautiful 
married  woman  who  had  refused  all  the  overtures  of  a  lover  was 
persuaded  by  the  bribed  priests  of  the  Temple  of  Isis  to  give 
herself  to  him  under  the  illusion  that  he  was  the  god,  Anubis. 
From  the  same  historian  we  know  how  the  Jews  preferred  to  die 

64 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

rather  than  tolerate  the  effigies  of  Caesar  when  Pontius  Pilate 
introduced  them  into  Jerusalem  upon  the  ensigns,  in  defiance  of 
the  precaution  of  previous  procurators  to  have  other  orna- 
ments upon  the  banners.  It  is  true  that  by  a  strange  contra- 
diction the  annual  head-tax  to  the  Temple  had  to  be  paid  not 
in  Jewish  copper  coins  but  in  silver  Tyrian  staters,  bearing 
the  head  of  the  town-god  Hercules,  and  on  the  reverse  the 
Ptolemaic  eagle,  with  the  legend  in  Greek  letters  "  Tyre  the 
holy  and  inviolable."  The  paradox  is  resolved  by  sundry  more 
or  less  casuistical  arguments,  and  by  the  hypothesis  of  Theo- 
dore Reinach  that  these  exact  and  well-alloyed  coins  were  (once 
thrown  into  the  Temple  treasury)  melted  down  into  ingots. 
But  there  is  no  such  suggestion  as  regards  the  tribute  paid  to 
Caesar,  and  in  a  conception  of  religion  which  forbade  even  the 
appearance  of  sin,  which  went  so  far  out  of  its  way  as  to  pro- 
hibit poultry  cooked  in  butter  lest  one  might  inadvertently 
seethe  a  kid  in  its  mother's  milk,  there  could  be  no  logical  place 
for  casuistry  except  to  add  stringency  to  a  precept.  It  was 
impossible  therefore  to  render  to  God  the  things  that  were 
God's  if  one  rendered  to  Caesar  the  tribute  that  was  Caesar's. 
It  is  as  if  by  an  unfortunate  symbolism,  Jesus  gave  the  very 
answer  that  demonstrated  the  impossibility  of  this  partition  of 
duties. 

XIII 

"Is  this  Armageddon?"  an  old  countrywoman  enquired  of 
me  wistfully.  She  was  interested  less  in  the  mighty  issues  of 
the  war  for  her  own  race,  than  in  the  joyous  prospect  of  the 
return  of  the  Jews  to  Palestine.  I  assured  her  that  all  the 
beasts  of  Daniel  were  in  the  fighting  line,  especially  that  fourth 
beast  dreadful  and  terrible  and  strong  exceedingly,  with  great 
iron  teeth,  the  beast  that  devoured  and  brake  in  pieces  and 
stamped  the  residue  writh  the  feet  of  it;  moreover  that  Death 
was  on  his  pale  horse  and  Hell  followed  with  him,  exactly  as 
predicted  in  Revelation.  Then  I  saw  that  a  greater  authority 
than  I  —  a  rural  rector  to  whom  France  is  indubitably  the 
right  foot  of  the  image  of  Daniel  —  had  decided  that  this  is 
but  the  sixth  vial,  not  the  seventh,  the  prelude  or  preparation, 
but  not  Armageddon  itself,  and  that  consequently  the  hour  of 
Zion  is  not  yet.  It  is  only  in  1934  that  the  Jews  will  return 
to  Palestine. 

It  must  be  admitted  that  negatively  at  least  the  rural  rector 

65 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

has  proved  correct.  As  one  who  was  "  called  to  the  colours," 
the  blue  and  white  colours  of  Zionism,  a  quarter  of  a  century 
ago  by  a  Viennese  dramatist  of  whom  I  had  never  heard  till  he 
sent  up  his  card,  endorsed  by  the  universally-known  author  of 
"  Degeneration,"  I  can  see  in  the  present  regime  in  Palestine 
very  little  resemblance  to  the  Jewish  State  which  my  strange 
visitor,  dropped  from  the  skies,  invited  me  to  help  him  estab- 
lish. In  the  interval  between  this  interview  in  a  London  suburb 
and  the  processional  entrance  of  Sir  Herbert  Samuel  into  "  the 
Jewish  National  Home  " —  the  High  Commissioner  taking  the 
dais  at  Jerusalem  in  the  name  of  George  V.,  and  his  few  fellow- 
Jews  lost  in  the  glittering  mass  of  Arab  effendis,  Bedouin 
sheikhs  with  silver  headgear  and  flowing  purple  robes,  and 
Mullahs  sane  and  splendiferous  in  white  turbans ;  of  British 
Governors,  and  Major  Generals,  and  Staff  Officers  and  Secre- 
taries, and  A.D.C.'s,  and  British  Consular  Kawasses  in  blue  and 
gold,  with  silver  swords  and  sceptres  —  I  have  made  speeches 
innumerable,  more  voluminous  even  than  my  equally  unpopular 
pleas  for  Female  Suffrage.  I  can  only  hope  all  this  spade- 
work  has  helped  to  dig  the  foundations  of  Zionism  and  not  the 
grave  in  which,  to  all  appearance,  it  is  being  buried  alive.  Only 
one  of  these  speeches  is  to  be  inflicted  on  the  reader,  but  in 
view  of  the  present  vogue  of  Zionism  in  high  Anglo-Jewish 
circles,  and  the  diversion  of  an  ex-Home  Secretary  to  its  nom- 
inal service,  it  is  interesting  to  recall  that  when  I  presided  over 
a  dinner  to  Dr.  Herzl  at  the  crucial  moment  of  his  leadership, 
at  the  crisis  when  he  thought  he  held  the  Sultan's  promise  of 
Palestine  if  only  two  million  pounds  could  be  raised,  a  member 
of  the  Maccaba?ans,  the  Club  which  was  giving  the  dinner, 
wrote  to  me  hoping  that  all  references  to  Zionism  would  be 
excluded  as  religiously  as  pork,  and  Dr.  Herzl  toasted  merely 
as  a  man  of  letters.  It  is  the  chance  turning-up  of  an  old 
cutting  from  the  Daily  Neves  that  has  reminded  me  of  this 
episode,  and  as  the  episode  has  now  historic  interest  and  does 
not,  I  think,  figure  in  Mr.  Sokolow's  "  History  of  Zionism,"  I 
reproduce  it  here : 

"  THE  ZIONIST  MOVEMENT 

"  WANTED    £2,000,000 

"  Dr.  Herzl,  the  originator  of  the  Zionist  movement,  was  enter- 
tained at  a  dinner  given  on  Tuesday  by  the  Maccabaeans,  a  Jewish 
society  that  restricts  its  membership  to  such  Jews  as  are  '  untainted 
by  commerce.' 

66 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  The  introduction  by  the  Chairman,  Mr.  Zangwill,  was  brief  but 
hearty.  '  We  Jews/  said  he,  '  have  followed  Dr.  Herzl's  amazing 
career  with  approving  goodwill  or  admiring  hostility.  Something  of 
that  regard  which  the  fiercest  Imperialist  has  for  De  Wet  the 
bitterest  anti-Zionist  has  for  Herzl  .  .  .  We  Maccabaeans  cannot 
pretend  to  ignore  what  Herzl  means  to  the  Jews;  we  cannot  but 
welcome  him  as  a  Prince  in  Israel,  who  has  felt  his  people's  sorrows 
as  Moses  felt  the  Egyptian  bondage,  and  who  has  sought  to  lead  the 
slaves  to  the  promised  land.  In  the  long  centuries  of  Israel's  exile 
the  nation  has  produced  great  men  enough  .  .  .  but  Dr.  Herzl  is 
the  first  statesman  the  Jews  have  had  since  the  destruction  of  Jeru- 
salem. The  gospel  of  Herzl  is  not  only  for  the  poor  Jews  who  lack 
bread,  but  for  the  rich  Jews  who  lack  a  conviction,  nay,  to  the 
world  at  large  —  a  world  relapsing  into  barbarism  and  dominated 
by  mechanism  —  it  restores  the  light  and  warmth  of  idealism. 
Never  since  Imperial  Rome  fell  in  its  rottenness  has  there  been  an 
hour  in  which  the  world  needed  so  much  the  inspiring  spectacle  of  a 
movement,  incorrupt  and  instinct  with  the  noblest  humanity.  And 
it  is  fitting  that  from  Zion  this  light  should  go  forth.' 

"  Dr.  Herzl  responded  to  this  eloquent  interpretation  of  his  pur- 
pose in  admirable  English.  He  is  a  tall,  dark  man,  with  pale, 
intellectual  features,  long  black  beard,  and  a  fine  manner.  Return- 
ing from  Constantinople  and  the  '  extraordinary  complimentary 
and  friendly  reception  '  extended  to  him  by  the  Sultan,  he  could 
only  ask,  '  Are  you  ready  ?  Are  you  ready  to  show  yourself  grateful 
for  an  historic  succour  which  is  being  brought  to  you?  Are  you 
ready  to  stand  by  him  who  is  ready  to  stand  by  you?  How  great, 
how  swift  is  your  readiness  ?  '  Without  money  —  two  million 
pounds  was  the  sum  demanded  —  nothing  could  be  done.  '  Even 
to  drag  iron  out  of  the  bowels  of  the  earth  gold  is  necessary,'  said 
Dr.  Herzl,  and,  judging  by  the  tone  of  the  gathering,  he  may  not 
have  to  wait  long  for  this  sum.  Those  present  included  some  of 
the  finest  minds  in  modern  Jewry  —  Professor  Vambery,  Colonel 
Goldsmid,  fresh  from  South  Africa;  Sir  Francis  Montefiore,  Dr. 
Gaster,  Mr.  Solomon,  the  artist,  and  many  others." 

The  exact  date  of  this  cutting  does  not  appear  on  it,  but  at 
the  back  there  is  an  advertisement  of  Irving  and  Ellen  Terry  in 
"  Madame  Sans-Gene  "  at  the  Lyceum,  which,  by  reference  to  a 
theatrical  authority,  gives  the  year  as  1901.  My  description 
of  the  world  in  this  year  as  "  a  world  relapsing  into  barbarism 
and  dominated  by  mechanism  "  throws  an  interesting  side-light 
on  the  current  view  that  the  globe  would  have  been  still  a  garden 
of  Eden  but  for  the  Teutonic  serpent.  For  this  was  not  the 
utterance  of  a  senile  laudator  temporis  acti,  but  of  an  observer 
well  on  the  right  side  of  forty. 

67 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Of  course  the  two  million  pounds  were  not  raised,  the  reporter 
had  mistaken  the  after-dinner  glow  for  enthusiasm:  indeed  a 
supplementary  leaderette  from  the  same  organ,  pinned  to  this 
report,  informs  the  world  that  "  the  Club  has  officially  disasso- 
ciated itself  from  the  new  enthusiasm."  "  On  the  other  hand," 
adds  the  Daily  News:  "  numbers  of  Christians,  as  well  as  Jews, 
who  hold  the  prophetic  interpretation  of  certain  Hebrew 
Scriptures,  believe  that  a  general  recolonisation  of  Palestine  is 
divinely  predicted,  is  already  in  progress,  and  is  certain  to  be 
completed  in  due  course.  In  the  minds  of  those  who  hold  it, 
this  forecast  is  intimately  connected  with  the  prophecies  of  the 
Second  Advent." 

I  have  no  doubt  but  that  these  Christian  minds  —  especially 
now  that  Armageddon  has  been  followed  by  some  materialisa- 
tion of  the  ancient  Jewish  hope  —  will  be  as  disappointed  as 
the  Zionists  themselves  with  my  common-sense  treatment  of  the 
Palestine  situation.  But  the  Zionists  have  chosen  to  translate 
the  glamorous  Messianic  legend  that  consoled  the  centuries  of 
exile  into  a  political  programme.  And  as  such  it  must  be 
brought  to  the  touchstone  of  practical  politics.  You  cannot 
have  a  poetic  licence  for  prose.  The  hard  facts  of  geography 
and  economics  must  be  faced  in  their  bare  verity.  You  cannot 
wreathe  them  in  roses,  not  even  in  roses  of  Sharon.  Nor  will 
it  do  to  babble  about  the  Prophecies;  or  iterate  the  blessed 
word,  Armageddon. 

The  Prophets  are  not  magnified  but  diminished  when 
regarded  primarily  as  Old  Moores  or  political  tipsters.  Ad- 
monition and  criticism  rather  than  prediction  is  their  true 
essence.  None  of  the  Hebrew  words  for  "  prophet  "  contains 
the  idea  of  forespeaking  which  that  Greek  word  has  unfortu- 
nately accentuated,  to  the  overshadowing  of  all  other  meanings 
of  the  prophetic  role.  The  Hebrew  nabi  means  a  mouthpiece ; 
roeh  or  chozeh,  a  seer.  The  greatest  of  the  Old  Testament 
prophets,  Jeremiah,  has  left  us  an  almost  scientific  diagnosis 
of  prophecy  proper.  He  is  mocked  and  derided  and  there  is 
upon  him  the  fear  of  even  graver  persecution.     Nevertheless 

"  If  I  say  I  will  not  make  mention  of  Him, 
Nor  speak  any  more  in  His  name, 
Then  there  is  in  my  heart  as  it  were  a  burning  fire 
Shut  up  in  my  bones. 
And  I  weary  myself  to  hold  it  in, 
But  cannot." 

68 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

It  is  the  same  fire  with  which  every  reformer  or  social  critic 
burns,  nay  which  enkindles  the  artist  to  liberate  at  any  cost  his 
peculiar  conception  of  his  art  and  no  other.  In  the  words  of 
Browning: 

"  Belief's  fire,  once  in  us, 
Makes  of  all  else  mere  stuff  to  show  itself." 

If,  however,  we  concentrate  our  attention  upon  the  minor 
aspect  of  Prophecy,  which  consists  in  foreshadowing,  then  there 
are  no  Prophecies  in  the  Bible  awaiting  fulfilment,  unless  it  be 
the  vision  of  a  warless  millennium.  What  people  usually  mean 
by  the  Prophecies  is  the  prognostication  of  the  return  to  Pales- 
tine of  the  Jewries  now  in  dispersion.  And  that  it  should  be 
imagined  there  is  any  direct  allusion  in  the  Bible  to  the  present 
situation,  is  one  of  the  oddest  results  of  the  petrifaction  of 
Israel  in  the  pages  of  that  book.  This  fallacy  about  the 
Prophecies  affects  even  cultured  people  who  have  grasped  that 
the  Bible  is  a  national  literature,  not  a  celestial  gramophone. 
It  is  this  delusion  which  turns  that  great  literature  into  a 
happy  hunting  ground  for  text-hunters  and  cranks  and  sec- 
tarians and  grotesque  calculators  of  the  number  of  the  Beast. 
It  sometimes  seems  as  if  nobody  reads  the  Bible  except  the 
inmates  of  lunatic  asylums  or  those  qualifying  for  residence. 
As  I  write  I  receive  an  apocalyptic  communication  from  a 
rhapsodical  suburban  householder,  whose  first  breathless  sen- 
tence, which  would  occupy  at  least  six  pages  of  this  book, 
informs  me  that  the  restoration  of  Palestine  via  England  is  due 
to  the  fact  that  the  English  are  "  God's  own  descendants," 
and  that  "  the  English  language  is  the  only  one  naturally 
spoken  in  the  hereafter ;  "  statements  which  leave  me  unalarmed 
by  his  apprehension  "  that  the  long-delayed  deliverance  of  lost 
souls  which  are  fluid  electricity  may  cause  the  earth  to  be  dis- 
placed by  tilting." 

Even  Lord  Byron,  when  he  wrote  his  "  Hebrew  Melodies," 
remarked  to  Nathan,  the  composer  of  their  music,  that  the 
present  wanderings  of  the  Hebrew  race  are  such  a  confirma- 
tion of  the  "  distant  prophecies  which  foreran  them  "  that  it  is 
impossible  to  compare  them  and  yet  be  an  infidel.  Nay,  M. 
Sokolow  himself,  to  whose  "  History  of  Zionism  "  I  am  indebted 
for  this  citation,  boldly  encourages  the  error  and  heaps  up 
utterances  from  all  parts  of  the  Old  Testament.  But  the  out- 
standing fact  about  the  Prophecies  is  that  they  had  all  come 

69 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

true  five  centuries  before  the  Christian  era.  The  comminations 
that  began  in  the  eighth  century  b.c.  with  Hosea  and  Amos 
were  fulfilled  by  the  exile  in  Babylon,  and  the  consolations  in 
the  return  to  Palestine  by  grace  of  Cyrus.  Babylon  was  not 
indeed  destroyed  as  suddenly  as  Jeremiah's  words  had  led  the 
faithful  sons  of  the  captivity  to  expect,  but  it  was  certainly 
"  fallen  "  as  suddenly  as  he  had  predicted,  and  this  conquest  of 
the  Chaldee  by  the  Persian  was  the  beginning  of  its  decay.  In 
two  centuries  builders  were  quarrying  in  the  temple  of  Bel,  and 
the  city  of  hanging  gardens  had  practically  become  "  heaps,  a 
dwelling-place  for  dragons,  an  astonishment,  and  an  hissing 
without  an  inhabitant."  It  was  during  the  troubled  interval 
between  the  destruction  of  the  Temple  by  Nebuchadnezzar  and 
the  beginning  of  the  reconstruction  under  Cyrus,  it  was  when 
Israel  sat  down  by  the  rivers  of  Babylon  and  wept  when  he 
remembered  Zion,  that  his  soul,  quickened  as  never  before,  pro- 
duced the  major  Prophets  and  the  Psalmists  that  are  his 
peculiar  glory.  It  was  when  he  hanged  his  harps  on  the  willow- 
trees  and  asked  how  could  he  sing  the  songs  of  the  Lord  in  a 
strange  land  that,  in  fact,  he  sang  them  most  sincerely  and 
passionately.  It  was  then  that  he,  for  the  first  time,  preferred 
Jerusalem  above  his  chief  joy.  It  was  then  that  the  ethical 
messages  of  the  older  prophets  first  found  their  real  response, 
and  that  the  tender  mysticism  by  which  Amos  had  expressed  the 
peculiar  bond  between  Israel  and  his  God  penetrated  sweetly 
into  the  soul  of  the  exiled  captives.  For  this  was  the  birth- 
period  of  Judaism  proper,  and  of  the  bulk  of  that  self-conscious 
literature,  which  first  inspired  and  then  enswathed.  The  very 
"  book  of  the  law  of  Moses  "  seems  scarcely  known  before  Ezra 
brought  it  from  Babylon.  It  was  too  in  the  sixth  century  b.c. 
that  the  historical  books  were  written,  re-edited  or  re-coloured 
to  constitute  the  epic  which  was  to  console  and  resurrect  the 
people  that  was  its  theme.  You  may  measure  the  greatness  of 
the  Hebrew  genius  by  comparing  the  utterances  of  Jeremiah, 
Isaiah  and  Ezekiel  in  those  years  of  national  agony  with  the 
output  of  Maeterlinck  and  Verhaeren,  and  the  other  Belgian 
poets  during  the  German  occupation. 

If  the  same  lamentations  and  consolations,  the  same  celestial 
menaces  and  reassurances  which  moved  the  contemporaries  of 
the  Hebrew  prophets  seem  still  more  apposite  to-day,  that  is 
only  because  history  repeats  itself.  The  prophets  were  not 
conscious  of  any  world  other  than  the  ancient.  But  it  shows 
their  depth  of  insight  —  or  of  foresight,  which  is  merely  insight 

70 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

projected  forwards  —  it  proves  how  truly  they  interpreted  the 
psychology  of  their  race,  that  the  same  words  which  touched 
the  Jews  of  twenty-five  centuries  ago,  are  as  availing  to-day, 
and  will  be  perhaps  no  less  applicable  in  a  national  catastrophe 
twenty-five  centuries  hence.  But  it  is  not  enough  to  say  that 
these  prophets  interpreted  the  soul  of  the  Jew :  they  performed 
the  same  service  for  humanity  at  large.  The  Bible  transcends 
the  race  that  produced  it,  like  all  great  literature,  though  none 
other  has  in  the  same  degree  carried  a  message  to  every  race 
and  grade  of  mankind.  So  universalisable  is  its  nationalism 
that  England  has  annexed  the  Hebrew  prophecies  to  her  own 
history,  even  as  her  sympathetic  genius  has  annexed  the  Bible 
to  her  literature,  drawing  sustenance  from  it  in  the  critical 
moments  of  her  destiny.  In  Scotland  the  affinity  with  Hebraism 
is  still  more  strongly  marked,  so  much  so  that  in  trying  to 
render  in  verse  the  essential  verity  of  the  Jew's  Sabbath,  I 
could  do  nothing  but  imitate  Burns's  "  Cottar's  Saturday 
Night  "  even  to  the  metre,  though  with  the  Jew  it  is  the  Friday 
night.  It  would  seem  that  though  the  Church,  to  differentiate 
the  creeds,  changed  the  Saturday  Sabbath  into  the  Sunday  of 
the  Lord's  Day,  yet  the  Jewish  habit  of  beginning  with  the 
evening  before  — "  And  the  evening  and  the  morning  were  one 
day  " —  persisted  or  resurged  spontaneously  among  the  Scotch. 
Nor  is  it  only  nations  that  find  inspiration  in  the  Hebrew  seers. 
There  is  no  revivalist,  be  it  of  a  language,  a  culture,  or  a  creed, 
but  draws  hope  and  faith  from  Ezekiel's  vision  of  the  dry  bones 
that  lived  again,  and  stood  upon  their  feet,  an  exceeding  great 
army.  Prophecy  is  a  force  for  its  own  fulfilment ;  the  vivid 
impression  it  produces  is  faith  in  the  making,  and  faith  moves 
mountains. 

There  are,  even  outside  the  Prophetic  Books,  passages  so 
terrible  in  their  truth  that  it  is  difficult  to  realise  they  were  not 
meant  for  to-day.  Take  the  twenty-eighth  chapter  of  Deu- 
teronomy : 

"  And  the  Lord  shall  scatter  thee  among  all  people,  from  the 
one  end  of  the  earth  even  unto  the  other  .  .  .  And  among  these 
nations  shalt  thou  find  no  ease,  neither  shall  the  sole  of  thy  foot 
have  rest:  But  the  Lord  shall  give  thee  there  a  trembling  heart, 
and  failing  of  eyes,  and  sorrow  of  mind:  And  thy  life  shall  hang 
in  doubt  before  thee;  and  thou  shalt  fear  day  and  night,  and  shalt 
have  none  assurance  of  thy  life:  In  the  morning  thou  shalt  say, 
Would  God  it  were  even!  and  at  even  thou  shalt  say,  Would  God 

71 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

it  were  morning!  for  the  fear  of  thine  heart  wherewith  thou  shalt 
fear,  and  for  the  sight  of  thine  eyes  which  thou  shalt  see." 

This  is  an  exact  description  of  the  state  of  mind  and  body  of 
the  Jews  in  many  parts  of  Europe  at  the  very  moment  of 
writing.  Yet  the  context  makes  it  clear  that  the  prophet  of 
woe  had  in  mind  only  local  and  temporal  conditions,  and  was 
anathematising  within  a  range  of  conception  which  did  not 
include  the  modern  world.  Till  they  were  invaded  by  Assyria, 
the  Jews,  isolated  in  body  as  in  mind,  never  began  to  realise 
even  the  ancient  world.  One  need  only  read  the  eleventh 
chapter  of  Isaiah  with  its  incongruous  mingling  of  spiritual 
and  political  triumph  to  see  that  for  the  prophet  the  Philistines 
and  the  Ammonites,  Edom  and  Moab,  were  all  visualised  as 
subsisting  up  to  the  millennium,  with  even  the  discords  of 
Ephraim  and  Judah  awaiting  their  resolution  on  that  day  of 
world-peace  and  Jewish  glory. 

Prophecy  is  not  then  anything  but  a  vivid  sense  of  fact. 
The  future  is  part  of  a  curve,  the  other  parts  of  which  —  the 
past  and  the  present  —  are  given.  Some  form  of  prophecy  is 
compulsory  upon  all  of  us,  whether  we  be  farmers  sowing  seed 
or  statesmen  introducing  measures,  and  the  chief  obstacle  to 
prophecy  is  not  the  difficulty  of  piercing  through  the  mist  which 
is  supposed  to  veil  the  future,  but  the  difficulty  of  piercing 
through  the  mist  which  veils  the  past,  and  above  all,  the  present. 


XIV 

But  although  there  was  nothing  supernatural  about  the 
Prophets  of  Israel,  least  of  all  the  apocalyptic  ravers,  nor  had 
even  the  greatest  extended  the  curve  of  fate  so  far  as  this  year 
of  grace,  it.  would  be  falling  into  the  opposite  error  to  imagine 
that  there  is  nothing  mystic  in  the  Zionist  situation,  or  that 
there  is  any  parallel  between  a  resurrection  of  Judaea  and  the 
resurrection  of,  say,  Poland. 

Poland  stood  —  and  stands  —  for  nothing  except  itself. 
But  it  is  impossible  to  reduce  to  the  same  simplicity  of  race- 
narrowness  and  national  pride  the  problem  of  a  people  which, 
besides  producing  or  inspiring  two  other  world-religions,  carried 
with  it  down  the  ages  its  own  religion,  and  fused  it  so  intimately 
with  the  lost  territorial  nationality  that  Judaism  has  never  been 
able  to  get  free,  or  to  resume  the  missionary  effort  which  it  was 

72 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

carrying  on  before  Jesus  was  born.  The  heathen  who  in  the 
day  of  Jewish  State  had  grasped  eagerly  at  Judaism  could  not 
be  expected  to  saddle  themselves  with  a  political  irredenta. 
They  preferred  to  be  themselves  "  redeemed  "  by  Christianity. 

To  the  tact  of  Jochanan  ben  Zakkai  must  be  allotted  the 
blame  of  this  complex  and  indecisive  situation,  which  has  lasted 
to  our  own  day,  though  doubtless  it  would  not  have  been  easy 
for  him  to  reconcile  the  beaten  Israelites  to  final  acceptance  of 
their  defeat.  The  same  struggle  in  fact  is  before  our  eyes  now 
among  the  Germans,  one  section  of  whom  strives  to  exalt 
Germanthum  as  a  precious  Kultur  for  the  world,  all  the  purer 
for  being  shredded  of  its  vestment  of  material  power.  Joch- 
anan was  the  trimmer  who  preaches  both  Kultur  and  a  future 
Weltmacht. 

There  is  a  many-sided  symbolism  in  the  dramatic  picture  of 
this  shrewd  Tcmna  escaping  from  Jerusalem  in  a  coffin,  what 
time  Titus  and  his  legions  hovered  at  the  gates  of  the  Holy  City. 
For  Jochanan  bore  in  his  own  breast  the  seeds  of  the  future, 
saved  Judaism  from  the  fall  of  the  Jewish  State.  The  zealots 
of  nationality  preferred  to  meet  the  conquering  Roman  with 
grim  suicide ;  Jochanan  founded  a  school  at  Jamnia,  under  the 
protection  of  Titus.  That  disentanglement  of  religion  from  a 
locale  which  Jesus  had  effected  for  the  world  at  large  was  in  a 
minor  degree  effected,  a  generation  after  him,  for  the  Jews 
themselves,  by  the  mailed  hand  of  Titus  and  the  insight  of  the 
prudent  sage.  Possibly  Jochanan  had  already  outgrown  the 
burnt  offerings  which  tied  Judaism  to  the  Temple ;  he  may  have 
felt  already  that  Israel's  greatness  was  spiritual,  belonged  to  a 
category  of  force  that  could  not,  and  should  not,  be  measured 
against  Rome's  material  might.  However  this  be,  his  recon- 
struction of  the  Sanhedrin,  even  in  the  absence  of  the  hewn- 
stone  hall  of  the  Temple  for  it  to  meet  in,  and  the  necessary 
conversion  of  the  substantial  sacrifices  into  offerings  of  prayer, 
made  the  salvage  of  Judaism  more  spiritual  than  the  original 
totality.  The  unifying  centre  was  no  longer  geographical,  and 
the  Jews  became  "  the  People  of  the  Book  "  in  a  far  profounder 
sense  than  when  they  were  the  people  of  a  soil,  too.  The  Law 
was  never  so  obeyed  in  Bible  times  as  it  was  when  the  record  of 
these  times  became  the  all-in-all. 

But  this  transformation  was  not  achieved  in  one  generation, 
nor  without  violent  reactions.  Scarce  half  a  century  after 
Jochanan  ben  Zakkai,  the  great  rebel,  Bar  Kochba  (Son  of  a 
Star),  beat  back  for  a  time  the  whole  might  of  Rome.     And  in 

73 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

the  monstrous  regime  of  religious  persecution  by  which  Hadrian 
avenged  the  difficult  suppression  of  the  uprising,  the  transform- 
ation of  Judaism  might  well  have  been  into  paganism. 

Thus,  although  Jerusalem  remained  throughout  the  entire 
Christian  era  in  the  hands  of  foreign  conquerors,  the  Jews 
always  retained  some  sense  of  being  colonists,  whose  mother  city 
was  in  Asia.  Some  day  it  would  be  their  own  city  again  —  but 
in  God's  good  time,  in  a  whirl  of  miracles!  Hence,  except 
under  the  ephemeral  inspiration  of  pseudo-Messiahs,  Zionism 
was  never  a  matter  of  practical  politics ;  it  was  a  shadowy, 
poetic  ideal,  outside  life;  a  romantic  reminiscence.  Old  men 
went  to  Jerusalem  to  die  —  not  to  live.  Its  earth  was 
imported  —  but  to  be  placed  in  coffins.  In  practice  Jews  have 
always  been  ardently  attached  to  the  country  of  their  birth, 
and  if  they  have  seemed  to  remain  apart,  Ezra  and  Nehemiah 
are  largely  responsible,  those  zealots  (more  Mosaic  than  Moses) 
who  stamped  out  marriages  with  other  peoples,  even  when  the 
strangers  accepted  Judaism.  The  very  Rabbis  of  the  Talmud 
could  not  endorse  this  principle,  yet  in  practice  it  became  the 
rule,  and  an  institution,  designed  in  the  fifth  century  before 
Christ  to  preserve  the  religion,  served  in  the  Dark  Ages  of 
Christendom  to  preserve  the  race.  Religion  and  race  had, 
indeed,  come  to  seem  one  and  the  same  thing.  And  against  this 
people,  already  doubly  cut  off  from  mankind,  the  Christian 
raised  his  material  wall  of  separation,  and  created  the 
Ghetto,  even  adding  the  death-penalty  to  the  forces  against 
fusion. 

Nor  was  the  transformation  into  mere  spiritual  Judaism 
ever  effected  radically.  Two  reactionary  influences  remained. 
Palestine  still  retained  a  certain  authority  over  the  Diaspora. 
Babylon,  indeed,  soon  asserted  itself  as  the  peer  of  Jerusalem, 
and  later,  with  the  movement  of  history  and  the  great  teachers, 
the  spiritual  hegemony  shifted  to  Spain,  to  Cairo,  to  Poland. 
But  underneath  all  this  flux  Jerusalem  was  still  the  Holy  City. 
Secondly  —  and  here  comes  in  Jochanan's  terrible  tact  —  the 
literary  ritual,  substituted  for  the  literal  sacrifices,  did  not 
profess  to  be  more  than  a  temporary  necessity,  and  the  sacred 
shambles,  that  would  have  been  soon  outgrown,  remained  among 
the  ancient  glories  to  whose  restoration  the  stubborn  national 
spirit  clung.  Rachel  wept  for  her  children,  and  comforted 
herself  by  the  belief  that  they  were  not  dead  but  sleeping.  As 
little  as  possible  was  changed  of  a  liturgy  enrooted  in  the  Holy 
Soil,  and  thus  it  came  to  pass  that  in  the  narrow,  sunless,  stony 

74 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

streets  of  European  Ghettos  shambling  students  and  peddlers 
offered  metaphorical  first-fruits  in  ingenious  lyrics,  and  cele- 
brated the  ancient  harvest-festival  of  Palestine  in  pious  acros- 
tics. Never  was  there  such  an  example  of  the  dominance  of 
the  word.  Life  was  replaced  by  Literature.  What  wonder  if 
the  love  of  Zion  grew  mainly  literary,  so  that  even  the  passion 
of  a  Jehuda  Halevi  for  Palestine  has  been  dubbed  more  the 
passion  of  a  troubadour  for  a  visionary  mistress  than  a  patri- 
otism with  its  roots  in  reality  ! 

Fantastic  and  factitious  though  this  love  of  Zion  was,  yet, 
supplemented  by  eschatological  superstitions,  it  made  Jerusalem 
still  the  mystic  City  of  God,  still  the  capital  of  the  Millennium, 
still  the  symbol  of  Israel's  misery  and  Israel's  ultimate  regenera- 
tion. And  even  before  modern  Zionism  arose,  in  the  Ghettos  of 
New  York  and  Philadelphia,  the  "  messenger  of  Zion  "  could  be 
met  on  the  cable-car,  going  his  rounds,  collecting  the  humble 
cents  which  enabled  greybeards  to  pore  over  moth-eaten 
Talmuds  in  the  Holy  City. 

Outwardly  the  people  that  led  this  strange  inner  life  was 
interfused,  in  greater  or  less  proportion,  with  almost  every 
people  on  the  planet.  We  find  it  energising  wherever  our  vision 
turns  —  from  England  to  Italy,  from  Poland  to  Persia,  from 
the  Barbary  States  to  Cochin  China.  It  lived  in  contact  with 
every  nation,  civilised  or  savage ;  it  underwent  the  influence  of 
every  environment,  it  played  a  part  in  every  history. 

Two  effects  followed,  first  the  transformation  of  Israel  into 
detached  groups,  each  of  which  was  apt  to  take  on  a  petty  cor- 
porate life  of  its  own  in  practical  obliviousness  of  its  larger 
national  unity;  second  the  transformation  of  function  from 
agricultural  to  commercial,  in  obedience  to  the  external  forces 
that  were  denying  Jews  land,  excluding  them  from  the  guilds  of 
labour,  and  restricting  them  to  finance. 

The  Jews,  in  fact,  became  the  middlemen  of  the  world,  as 
well  intellectually  as  commercially. 

This  was  their  function  in  the  symbiosis,  as  biologists  phrase 
it ;  these  were  the  terms  on  which  they  were  permitted  to  live  for 
the  benefit  of  their  neighbours,  and  so  pliantly  did  they  adapt 
themselves  to  the  service  of  mankind  that  the  natural  human 
instinct  for  political  independence  was  finally  atrophied.  Liv- 
ing thus  everywhere,  yet  denied  territorial  possessions  any- 
where and  therefore  tied  nowhere,  they  were  turned  into  a  race 
of  nomads. 

They  became,  in  fact  —  though  in  a  novel  sense  —  a  people 

75 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

of  Commercial  Travellers.  But  one  thing  must  be  added:  the 
Commercial  Traveller  carried  always  amid  his  samples  —  a 
Bible. 

And  this  forms  the  true  centre,  a  book  substituted  for  a 
geographic  centre,  and  a  condition  of  spirit  for  a  point  of 
space. 

And  moving  round  this  pivot,  the  landless  denationalised 
groups  retain  subtly  their  sense  of  constituting  a  people,  nay, 
the  Chosen  People,  and  thus  they  win  back  the  self-respect  and 
dignity  which  the  contempt  of  Christendom  and  Islam  must 
otherwise  have  undermined.  They  remain,  indeed,  the  conscious 
superiors  of  their  persecutors,  the  aristocrats  of  faith. 

For  those  around  them  seem  to  them  given  over  to  savage  or 
imperfect  beliefs,  however  noble  the  temples  reared  to  other 
gods  than  the  one  sole  unpicturable  Spirit,  Creator  of  Heaven 
and  Earth,  who  has  selected  Israel  to  make  known  his  name  to 
the  heathen.  And  thus,  although  these  groups  speak  Spanish 
or  French,  Chinese  or  Dutch,  Russian  or  Arabic,  although  they 
change  their  psychology  and  even  their  physical  appearance  in 
harmony  with  the  particular  environment,  their  religion,  woven 
into  the  very  texture  of  life  by  countless  ceremonies  and  pictur- 
esque traditions,  keeps  them  still  unified,  even  as  the  Hebrew  of 
the  Synagogue  services  provides  an  undying  lingual  link. 

Like  loose  water,  then,  the  race  —  during  almost  the  entire 
Christian  Era  —  flowed  easily  from  one  country  to  another, 
moving  under  pressure  of  necessity,  and  running  into  every  kind 
of  shape  forced  upon  it  by  the  local  configuration,  everywhere 
reflecting  different  skies  and  other  trees,  and  yet  to  itself  all 
parts  of  the  same  water,  immiscible  with  other  streams,  and  all 
ultimately  to  flow  to  Palestine. 

This  is  a  condition  from  which  one  may  easily  prophesy 
persistence.  A  people  that  has  learned  to  live  without  a 
country  is  unconquerable. 

Might  is  baffled  when  opposed  to  the  ubiquitous,  the  infinitely 
evasive.  For  it  will  never  be  simultaneous ;  never  will  the  com- 
bined peoples  break  into  an  attack  upon  the  Jews,  as  at  the 
stroke  of  a  conductor's  baton.  Masses  may  be  forcibly  baptised 
here  and  there,  though  even  that  is  met  by  crypto-Judaism. 
And  there  are  always  plenty  of  other  Jews  elsewhere,  vigorous 
and  prolific.     Here  indeed  is  the  secret  of  immortality. 

But  there  is  a  force  that  is  greater  than  might  —  it  is  love. 
Ever  since  the  eighteenth  century  this  force  of  love  has  been 
acting  upon  the  Jewish  people.     With  that  epoch  of  revolution 

76 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

and  its  quickened  sense  of  the  human  brotherhood,  began  the 
break-up  of  the  Ghettos  in  Western  Europe.  The  Jewish  clans, 
invited  outside  their  high  walls  and  admitted  gradually  to  the 
civic  life  of  Christendom,  permitted  to  de-specialise  themselves 
from  commerce,  and  brought  into  contact  with  modern  critical 
thought,  found  themselves  exposed  to  a  double  disintegration. 
They  were  undermined  from  within  and  absorbed  from  without. 
Gone  —  at  least  from  those  educated  in  the  general  European 
schools  —  was  that  naive  sustaining  conception  of  their 
superiority,  their  providential  mission.  The  great  achieve- 
ments of  Christendom,  not  only  in  the  spiritual  domain,  but  in 
the  realm  of  arts  and  letters,  became  clear  to  them. 

The  reason  for  their  isolation  seemed  obsolete.  The  aspira- 
tion for  Palestine  was  felt  to  be  incongruous,  even  as  a  far-off 
religious  ideal.  Again  it  was  proclaimed  —  by  Moses  Mendels- 
sohn this  time  —  that  Judaism  is  larger  than  a  land :  that  its 
future  realm  must  be  that  of  spiritual  conquest.  But  in  the 
process  of  interfusion  which  set  in,  the  conquest  was  not  to 
Judaism.  Mendelssohn's  own  grandchildren  became  Christians. 
That  would  have  been  well  enough,  had  not  with  many  the 
acceptance  of  Christianity  been  a  weak  concession  to  the 
tyranny  of  society,  which  has  in  no  country  quite  ceased  to 
penalise  Judaism.  For  the  Jew's  loss  of  his  old  faith  was  not 
necessarily  compensated  by  a  new  belief,  and  conversion  —  espe- 
cially in  Germany  —  was  more  often  a  mark  of  indifference  than 
of  illumination. 

But  the  freer  the  Jew  is  left  the  more  he  tends,  if  not  towards 
Christianity,  towards  a  broader  view  of  it,  and  towards  the 
acceptance  of  Christ  in  the  Apostolic  chain  of  Hebrew 
prophets.  The  modern  Jew  is  a  pro-Christian,  only  too  eager 
to  admire  the  ideals  of  whatever  nation  he  lives  amid,  only  too 
uncritical.  There  can  be  little  doubt,  therefore,  that  were  the 
Jew  left  to  himself  and  given  a  free  run  and  free  elbow-room, 
he  would,  in  any  country  immune  from  new  influxes  of  Jews,  be 
practically  merged  with  his  environment  in  the  course  of  a  few 
generations. 

For  this  consummation,  however,  Christendom  is  too  unchris- 
tian to  wait.  It  requires  three  or  four  generations  after  the 
first  emancipation,  and  before  these  generations  are  up,  some- 
thing is  sure  to  happen  to  throw  the  Jew  back  upon  himself  in 
reactionary  regidescence :  the  Dreyfus  case  is  what  Bacon  calls 
an  "  ostensive  instance,"  and  the  all-pervading  anti-Semitism 

77 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

that  has  followed  the  Great  War  with  its  swarm  of  massacres  in 
the  more  anarchic  countries  is  another. 

Two  opposing  forces  are  thus  at  work  upon  the  Jew  —  the 
wind  and  the  sun.  The  gaberdine,  thrown  open  for  a  moment 
in  the  burst  of  heat,  is  buttoned  tighter  the  next  before  the 
biting  blast.  Even  were  the  sunshine  as  constant  and  ubiqui- 
tous as  the  race,  this  stubborn  life-force  might  not  necessarily 
relax  before  it,  since  there  would  always  be  local  differences  of 
temperature  and  local  variations  of  resistance,  and  any  rem- 
nant in  any  country  would  be  sufficient  to  restock  this  eternal 
people. 

But  considering  how  fitful  and  evanescent  this  sunshine  is  at 
its  best,  how  swiftly  veiled  by  regathering  clouds  of  prejudice  — 
note  even  in  free  England  the  outcry  against  the  alien  —  con- 
sidering, too,  that  the  bulk  of  the  race  is  still  immured  in  the 
Dark  Ages,  it  may  safely  be  prophesied  that  the  people  whose 
obstinacy  was  already  denounced  by  the  Roman  writers  will 
long  continue  to  persist  in  comparative  isolation,  however  its 
religion  becomes  modified,  as  it  cannot  fail  to  be  vitally  modi- 
fied, under  the  influence  of  modern  thought  and  freer  life  con- 
ditions. 

And  if  this  much  could  be  predicted,  even  without  taking 
account  of  the  greatest  conservative  factor  in  modern  Jewry, 
how  much  more  confidently  may  it  be  predicted,  when  we  allow 
for  this  marvellous  new  factor  —  Zionism? 

For,  as  if  indeed  by  a  historical  miracle,  just  as  the  ancient 
religion  begins  to  weaken  and  the  segregating  rites,  ceremonies, 
and  dietary  laws  to  dissolve,  a  new  cohesive  force  arises  to  bind 
together  the  loosening  atoms  of  Israel.  Or  perhaps  it  was 
always  there  —  this  sense  of  racial  unity  —  perhaps  it  was  the 
deep  basal  force  of  which  unity  of  religion  was  only  a  super- 
ficial effect. 

It  is  strange  to  consider  how  little  the  modern  Jew  has  cared 
to  proselytise ;  how  strongly  he  has  felt  that  his  peculiar  religion 
was  suited  only  to  the  peculiar  people. 

It  may  be,  correspondingly,  that  Jew  hatred,  which  formerly 
posed  as  religious  and  now  poses  as  economic  and  social,  was 
really  always  merely  racial  —  the  hatred  for  a  superior  people; 
a  people  that  whether  by  a  climatic  accident  or  biological  sport, 
or  whether  by  providential  choice,  divides  with  the  ancient 
Greeks  the  hegemony  of  races  and  outdoes  even  the  Greeks  by 
still  existing  with  undiminished  vitality  and  recuperativeness. 
But  whatever  be  the  true  motive-power  of  so-called   anti- 

78 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Semitism,  and  whether  it,  or  race,  or  religion  has  been  the  true 
preservative  of  the  Jewish  people,  the  Zionist  movement  com- 
pounded of  all  these  three  anti-septic  factors  —  evoked  by 
Judaeophobia,  fed  by  racial  sympathy,  and  inspired  by  religious 
hopes  —  has  come  to  cry  halt  to  disintegration,  to  rescue  at 
once  the  Jewish  people  from  persecution  and  the  Jewish  psy- 
chology —  with  its  rare  spiritual  products  —  from  submer- 
gence in  the  general  life. 

An  assertion  of  Jewishness  from  within,  it  has  been  more 
powerfully  cohesive  than  even  the  external  pressure  of  persecu- 
tion in  Russia  or  Roumania ;  it  has  captured  the  "  intellectuals  " 
by  pride  as  well  as  by  pity. 

To-day  it  knits  together  a  thousand  vacillators  and  holds 
them  in  the  brotherhood,  awaiting  the  necessarily  slow  emer- 
gence of  the  "  Jewish  National  Home  "  in  Palestine.  Waiting 
without  working  is  a  form  of  opium-eating  —  it  has  been  the 
disease  of  the  Jew  for  eighteen  centuries  to  intoxicate  himself 
weakly  with  visions  of  coming  glory  —  but  working  while  wait- 
ing is  a  noble  stimulation  that  is  already  producing  a  renais- 
sance of  Jewish  life  and  letters,  and  helping  the  Jew  to  shuffle 
off  the  ignoble  coil  of  the  Ghetto.  Already  the  swift  develop- 
ment of  physical  manliness  under  new  open-air  conditions  has 
brought  back  in  the  Palestine  Colonies  the  ancient  Maccabaean 
type. 

Writing  in  1903  at  the  invitation  of  the  Daily  Mail  to 
explain  Zionism  to  its  readers,  I  pointed  out  that  its  ultimate 
aim  was  "  the  creation  of  a  model  state,  which,  set  on  Zion's 
Hill,  may  be  a  light  to  the  peoples. 

"  The  Jew's  facile  worship  of  Christendom,"  I  pointed  out, 
"  has  not  been  entirely  merited  by  its  solutions  of  the  problems 
of  civilisation;  his  moral  genius  is  not  yet  outmoded  or  super- 
erogatory. 

"  The  race  which  produced  Moses,  Isaiah  and  Spinoza  has 
still  other  messages  to  speak,  and  cross-fertilised  as  it  now  must 
be  by  all  that  Christianity  has  achieved  in  the  sun  during  its 
own  centuries  of  hidden  life,  it  will  surely  not  flower  into  its 
third  national  period  without  bearing  some  new  precious  fruit 
for  the  human  race,  whose  service  is  its  highest  ideal." 

XV 

It  cannot  be  too  clearly  understood  that  Zionism,  although 
its  ultimate  aim  is  religious  in  the  largest  sense  of  that  much 

79 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

misunderstood  word,  is  a  modern  political  movement  whose 
origin  and  methods  differ  toto  ccclo  from  the  mystic  Zionism  of 
the  past.  Mr.  Israel  Cohen  in  his  valuable  compilation,  "  Jew- 
ish Life  in  Modern  Times,"  has  an  eloquent  passage  on  the 
pitiful  waste  of  blood,  of  hope,  of  prayer,  through  the  Dark 
Ages  of  Jewry  had  national  restoration  been  finally  surrendered 
as  a  mere  fable.  But  this  is  an  absolute  falsification  of  history. 
The  national  restoration  for  which  the  Jew  prayed  was  insep- 
arable from  the  re-establishment  of  the  Judaism  of  the  Temple. 
The  Jewish  martyrs  of  the  Middle  Ages  went  to  the  stake  not 
for  the  unity  of  Jewry,  but  for  the  unity  of  Jehovah.  "  In 
that  day  the  Lord  shall  be  One  and  His  Name  One."  What 
would  make  these  old  Jews  turn  in  their  graves  would  be  to  read 
atheistic  articles  by  Jerusalem  journalists,  or  to  witness  the 
crusades  of  the  young  colonists  of  Palestine  against  the  Holy 
Sabbath.  Political  Zionist  though  I  am,  I  cannot  share  the 
intolerance  for  the  Jews  of  the  old  type  who  live  in  Jerusalem 
on  the  subsidies  of  the  Diaspora.  I  know  how  economically 
reprehensible  and  spiritually  contemptible  they  are  to  the  Grad- 
grinds  of  the  European  Jewries,  but  when  I  think  of  the  blood- 
soused  plains  of  Europe,  I  feel  more  strongly  than  ever  that  in 
these  frowsy  greybeards  poring  over  their  obsolete  Talmuds  in 
the  airless  academies  of  the  sunless  stone  alleys,  and  hugging 
their  worm-eaten  traditions  to  their  caftancd  breasts,  we  have 
a  finer  type  of  humanity  than  the  Prussian  Junker  in  all  his 
bravery,  and  that  it  pays  a  people  better  to  keep  up  such  a 
standing  army  of  mystics  and  students  than  to  nourish  the 
insolence  of  a  military  caste.  And  if  the  purpose  of  Zionism 
was  merely  to  beget  another  national  type  on  the  stereotyped 
Western  pattern,  it  would  not  be  worth  the  striving.  Though 
the  worm-eaten  traditions  of  these  caftancd  ancients  cannot  be 
resurrected  as  they  dream,  yet  must  the  true  inwardness  of  their 
dream  be  respected. 

Happily  the  noble  allocution  of  Dr.  Wcizmann,  the  Zionist 
leader,  at  the  laying  of  the  foundation  stone  of  the  Hebrew 
University  in  Jerusalem,  like  the  similar  oration  of  Sir  Herbert 
Samuel  at  a  banquet  before  his  departure  for  Palestine,  proves 
that  the  Zionist  leaders  are  undertaking  the  task  in  this  very 
spirit  and  that  they  mean  not  only  Hebrew  to  be  heard  in  the 
streets  but  the  voice  of  Jerusalem. 

In  this  "  Psaume  de  la  Terre  Promise,"  the  Jewish  poet, 
Edmond  Fleg,  looks  to  one  of  Israel's  sons,  "  un  frere  de  Mo'ise, 
un  frere  de  Jesus"  to  write  the  third  and  last  Testament  "  sur 

80 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

le  parchemin  des  plaines  reconquises,"  and,  recalling  the  drown- 
ing of  Egyptians  that  marked  Israel's  first  passage  across  the 
Red  Sea,  demands  that  this  time  the  waters  shall  close  without 
agony  in  Israel's  wake. 

Unfortunately  it  is  difficult  to  see  how  —  under  the  British 
Government's  interpretation  of  its  promise  to  the  Jews  —  any 
situation  can  be  produced  in  Palestine  remotely  resembling  the 
Restoration  for  which  one  has  worked,  or  which  the  poets  and 
the  people  celebrate,  or  which  these  noble  programmes  imply 
and  necessitate. 

XVI 

To  show,  however,  that  though  compelled  to  repudiate  the 
political  imprudence  of  pledging  even  the  Jews  of  enemy  coun- 
tries to  England,  I  was  ready  to  give  the  diplomacy  of  the 
Zionist  leaders  and  the  bona  fides  of  the  British  politicians  the 
benefit  of  the  doubt,  I  reproduce  from  a  Press  report  my  speech 
at  the  great  demonstration  at  the  London  Opera  House  on 
December  3,  1917,  in  celebration  of  Mr.  Balfour's  historic 
promise  of  "  a  Jewish  National  Home  in  Palestine  " —  a  promise 
categorically  repeated  on  the  platform  of  the  Opera  House  by 
Lord  Robert  Cecil  and  Sir  Mark  Sykes  on  behalf  of  the  govern- 
ment. Speaking  as  President  of  the  rival  Jewish  Territorial 
Organisation  (the  Ito)  I  said: 

"  To-day  I  am  here  not  for  criticism  but  for  congratulation  and 
co-operation.  I  congratulate  Dr.  Weizmann  and  M.  Sokolow  upon 
their  historic  achievement  in  the  region  of  diplomacy.  To  see  that 
this  is  followed  by  a  similar  achievement  in  the  more  difficult  region 
of  practice  is  the  duty  of  all  Israel.  Particularly  is  it  the  duty 
of  the  Ito,  founded  as  it  was  to  procure  a  territory  upon  an  auton- 
omous basis.  For  the  Ito  to  oppose  any  really  practicable  plan  for 
a  Jewish  territory  would  be  not  only  treason  to  the  Jewish  people, 
but  to  its  own  programme.  And  as  a  first-fruit  of  the  friendly  nego- 
tiations with  Zionism,  which  began  in  July,  I  am  happy  to  be  able 
to  join  with  you  in  welcoming  the  sympathy  of  the  Government  with 
Jewish  aspirations. 

"  But  I  do  not  come  to  the  Government,  as  Lord  Morley  tells  us 
the  Kaiser  came  to  him,  with  mock  salaams  and  marks  of  Oriental 
obeisance,  for  I  have  long  maintained  that  after  a  war  for  liberty 
and  the  rights  of  small  nations,  this  very  reparation  was  due  to  that 
unhappy,  scattered,  and  divided  people  which  has  bled  and  suffered 
with  all  the  belligerents.  And  as  an  English-born  citizen  I  am 
proud  that  my  country  by  this  pro-Jewish  manifesto  has  wiped  out 
the  stain  of  her  alliance  with  the  fallen  Russian  Pharaoh.     But 

81 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

whatever  the  general  Jewish  gratitude  for  this  extension  of  the 
principle  of  nationalities,  the  Jews  in  Turkey  and  other  now  enemy 
countries  are  as  loyal  to  their  fatherlands  as  we  to  ours,  and  we  who 
stand  here  can  have  no  claim  to  pledge  the  race  to  any  Power  or 
Powers.  All  we  can  say  is  that  happily  the  vast  majority  are  con- 
centrated in  those  allied  and  democratic  countries  with  which  they 
are  in  natural  affinity.  Particularly  close  is  their  affinity  with  the 
English.  I  am  not  referring  to  the  theory  of  the  Anglo-Israelites 
that  the  English  are  the  Lost  Ten  Trihes,  though  I  observe,  in 
passing,  how  strange  it  is  that  while  some  Jews  are  so  anxious  to  be 
accounted  Englishmen,  some  Englishmen  are  so  anxious  to  be 
accounted  Israelites.  But  it  is  not  surprising  that  the  nation  whose 
noble  version  of  our  Scriptures  has  made  the  Bible  almost  a  British 
possession,  should  vibrate  to  Jewish  national  aspirations.  Was  it 
not  an  Englishwoman,  George  Eliot,  who  invented  Zionism,  and 
who,  five  years  before  even  Pinsker,  marvellously  interpreted  the 
yet  unborn?  Was  it  not  England,  too,  that  created  Territorialism 
by  the  epoch-making  offer  of  a  territory  in  East  Africa  contained 
in  that  other  historic  letter  from  Lord  Lansdowne?  An  enemy  of 
Zionism  has  pointed  out  that  Governments  come  and  go  —  for  my 
part  I  am  glad  they  do  —  but  this  sympathy  with  the  Jewish  cause 
cannot  be  uprooted  with  any  individual  Government.  It  is  a  British 
tradition.  It  was  a  wise  instinct  that  led  to  our  shores  the 
immortal  founder  of  Zionism,  Dr.  Herzl;  here  he  first  delivered  his 
message,  here  he  established  the  financial  institutions  of  his  move- 
ment. 

"  But  it  is  not  only  a  Jewish  national  home  that  our  people  needs. 
There  is  the  further  and  not  less  momentous  principle  which  Jewry 
has  of  late  united  in  demanding  —  equality  of  rights  with  their 
fellow-citizens  in  every  country  for  all  Jews  who  may  be  unable 
or  unwilling  to  take  up  the  new  citizenship  in  Palestine.  This  prin- 
ciple is  the  more  important  inasmuch  as,  out  of  our  thirteen  or 
fourteen  million  Jews,  only  a  small  minority  can  possibly  return  to 
Palestine  in  any  foreseeable  period.  Indeed,  but  for  the  fact  that 
the  Russian  Revolution  has  in  all  probability  brought  freedom  to 
the  six  million  Jews  of  Russia,  I  should  still  consider  Palestine  an 
utterly  inadequate  territory,  and  Galveston  as  still  the  one  gate  of 
hope.  But  as  things  providentially  are,  the  same  programme  can 
combine  a  national  home  for  the  minority  in  Palestine  with  freedom 
and  diversity  of  political  status  for  the  majority  without.  One 
would  have  thought  that  such  a  statesmanlike  solution  of  both  as- 
pects of  the  Jewish  question  would  find  all  Israel  contented.  But 
no !  the  words  '  Jewish  National  Home  '  offend  the  patriotism  of 
certain  leading  British  Jews.  They  are  so  very  English,  you  see. 
You  will  perhaps  remember  the  escaped  German  officer  who  took  up 
his  abode  in  a  London  hotel.  He  spoke  English  perfectly,  he  wore 
immaculate   English  clothes,  he  gave   a   genuine   London   address. 

82 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Only,  instead  of  writing,  say,  '  55,  Park  Lane/  he  wrote  '  Park 
Lane,  55.'  And  that  little  difference  gave  him  away.  So  you  may 
see  English-born  Jews,  bred  at  English  public  schools  and  English 
universities,  sometimes  in  the  English  public  service,  sometimes  even 
married  into  old  English  families,  yet  betrayed  as  un-English  by 
just  one  point  —  they  are  against  the  rise  of  that  Jewish  State,  with 
which  every  true  Englishman  sympathises. 

"  But  let  us  not  be  unfair  to  these  British  Jews.  If  they  protest 
too  much,  yet  their  protestations  are  not  without  reason.  A  burnt 
child  dreads  the  fire,  and  Israel  has  a  long  memory  of  persecution 
and  misunderstanding.  Even  to-day,  when  our  sons  are  dying 
for  England,  anti-Semitic  organs  unite  with  irresponsible  Zion- 
ists to  proclaim  that  we  are  no  true  citizens ;  that  here  we  have 
no  abiding  city.  Apparently  all  Jews  outside  Palestine  are  to 
be  merely  protected  by  their  consul  from  Jerusalem  —  two  mil- 
lions, say,  in  Palestine  protecting  twelve  millions  outside;  a 
small  tail  indeed  to  wag  so  large  a  dog.  We  Territorialists  have 
always  repudiated  such  political  utopianism;  from  the  first  our  for- 
mula ran  '  To  procure  a  territory  upon  an  autonomous  basis  for 
those  Jews  who  cannot  or  will  not  remain  in  the  lands  in  which  they 
live  at  present.'  For  those  and  for  those  only.  Not  for  those  who 
can  or  will  remain  in  their  present  lands.  With  these  there  may  be 
a  spiritual  connection;  there  cannot  be  a  political.  And  to-day, 
when  —  to  quote  your  great  leader,  Max  Nordau — 'the  period  of 
rhetoric  is  over  —  the  hour  of  deeds  is  approaching  ' —  I  am  glad  to 
have  the  assurance  of  the  Zionist  leaders  here  that  they  unreservedly 
accept  the  Government's  stipulation  that  '  nothing  shall  be  done 
which  may  prejudice  the  rights  and  political  status  enjoyed  by  Jews 
in  any  other  country.'  Once  Zionism  is  established  on  this  sound 
basis,  not  only  does  its  formula  become  identical  with  the  Ito's,  but  I 
can  see  no  reason  why  all  Israel  should  not  co-operate  with  both 
organisations  in  developing  Palestine  as  a  Jewish  National  Home 
for  those  Jews  who  can  or  will  go  there.  To  diminish  the  risks  of 
confusion,  let  Palestine  be  called  Judaea,  and  let  the  Jews  who  adopt 
its  citizenship  be  called  Judaeans.  Then  all  the  others  will  remain 
as  before,  Jews  —  Jews  of  whatever  political  allegiance  they  choose. 
A  national  home  in  Palestine  —  freedom  and  equal  rights  every- 
where else;  here  surely  is  a  platform  that  can  unite  all  Israel. 

"  And,  despite  the  grumbling,  it  is  uniting  them.  They  are  all 
coming  to  you.  Some,  of  course,  are  upset;  the  Captivity  had  lasted 
nearly  2,000  years,  they  had  hoped  it  would  last  their  time.  Still, 
they  are  coming  —  you  may  even  hope  for  Sir  Francis  Montefiore ! 
Josephus  tells  us  that  Jerusalem  fell  through  Jewish  faction;  if 
Jewish  concord  could  bring  about  its  restoration,  the  city  torn  from 
the  Turk,  after  exactly  400  years  of  that  Lord  of  Misrule,  would  be 
already  ours.  For,  to-day,  all  roads  lead  to  Zion.  This  is  the  day 
of   alliances.     Israel,   like   every   other  people,   must   have   allies. 

83 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

But  they  must  be  allies  who  come  to  help  and  not  to  betray.  At 
this  very  moment  a  meeting  of  the  Maccabaeans  —  probably  under 
the  inspiration  of  the  Jewish  Chronicle  —  is  considering  how  to 
unite  all  parties  in  Palestine  work.  But  let  us  be  clear  what  that 
work  is.  It  is  not  a  mere  question  of  Palestine  immigration;  it  is  a 
question  of  a  national  home  on  an  autonomous  basis.  The  Jewish 
ideal  proclaims  not  merely  Leshanah  liabaa  bey'rushalayim  ('  Next 
year  in  Jerusalem') — it  says  also  Leshanah  habaa  beni  chorin 
('  Next  year,  sons  of  Freedom  ').  John  Hay,  when  told  that  cer- 
tain peoples  were  not  fit  for  autonomy,  replied,  '  No  people  is  fit 
for  anything  else.'  I  do  not  say  this  autonomy  must  come  at  a 
bound.  Though,  in  my  opinion,  the  boldest  way  is  always  the  best, 
and  responsibility  is  a  people's  best  educator,  yet  I  am  prepared  to 
make  all  possible  concessions  to  circumstances  and  history.  But  un- 
less the  Palestine  colonisation  is  so  planned  that  it  must  eventually 
produce  the  national  autonomous  home,  I,  for  one,  will  not  devote 
my  limited  strength  to  such  a  mockery  of  Jewish  aspirations.  The 
times  are  too  serious  and  tragic  for  such  trifling.  Mount  Zion  is  in 
labour.  Shall  it  produce  a  mouse?  No,  it  must  produce  a  lion  — 
the  lion  of  Judah. 

"  I  have  done  my  best  to  allow  for  the  morbid  psychology  of  the 
British  Jews,  for  the  shell-shock  that  our  unhappy  history  has  pro- 
duced on  their  nervous  system.  But  if  Palestine  comes  under  Brit- 
ain, what  becomes  of  their  apprehensions?  Why  the  Palestine 
Jews  can  come  into  their  very  League  of  British  Jews!  And  if 
Palestine  is  neutralised  or  internationalised,  it  can  never  develop 
those  military  possibilities  which  alone  make  a  people  suspicious 
to  its  neighbours.  But  the  most  important  consideration  which  our 
friends  of  the  Right  have  overlooked  is  that  everything  is  in  the 
melting-pot;  that  the  bad  old  world  we  have  known  is  not  the  world 
we  shall  live  in  after  the  war;  that  there  may  even  be  a  League  of 
Nations.  For  think  to  what  this  old  system  of  mutually  hostile 
States  has  brought  our  planet.  Saul  slew  his  thousands  and  David 
his  ten  thousands,  but  to-day  the  Angel  of  Death  does  not  suffice 
for  the  volume  of  destruction.  He  has  commandeered  all  the  other 
angels  into  his  service  —  the  angels  of  fire  and  the  angels  of  air  — 
he  has  conscribed  the  very  cherubim.  There  is  death  in  the  heavens 
above  and  the  earth  beneath  and  the  waters  under  the  earth.  The 
scions  of  civilisation  shrivel  up  one  another  with  spirted  flames  or 
boiling  oil.  .Millions  wander  and  perish  —  in  Poland  no  child  un- 
der seven  has  been  left  alive  —  one  Serbian  in  every  four  is  dead, 
one  of  every  two  Armenians.  Thousands  of  women  have  been  dis- 
honoured; the  camps  of  captives,  the  hospitals  of  the  wounded,  are 
numbered  by  the  myriad ;  plagues,  famine  and  civil  war  ravage  the 
peoples;  the  cities  are  full  of  the  cripples  and  blinded;  the  whole 
earth  groaneth  and  travaileth. 

"  If  we  thought  that  all  this  was  only  to  end  in  the  same  old 

84 


THE  VOICE  OP  JEKUSALEM 

world,  life  would  hardly  be  worth  living.  Where  there  is  no  vision, 
says  the  Biblical  sage,  the  people  perish.  I  say  that  without  the 
vision  of  a  League  of  Nations  the  whole  world  will  perish.  And 
this  vision  is  no  mere  dream  of  poets  or  dilettanti.  It  is  the  sober 
aspiration  of  statesmen  like  Mr.  Asquith,  like  Lord  Bryce,  like  Lord 
Lansdowne,  like  President  Wilson,  like  the  greatest  personality  the 
war  has  revealed,  I  mean  General  Smuts.  But  this  aspiration  was 
not  originated  by  General  Smuts  or  his  fellow-statesmen.  It  is  the 
vision  of  our  own  Isaiah:  '  They  shall  beat  their  swords  into  plough- 
shares and  their  spears  into  pruning  hooks ;  nation  shall  not  lift 
sword  against  nation,  neither  shall  there  be  war  any  more.'  In  such 
a  world,  if  it  emerges,  would  it  matter  if  we  Jews  did  have  a  single 
nationality,  if  within  all  these  leagued  nations  there  was  this  still 
finer  core  of  comradeship?  Even  in  the  old  bad  world,  Jewish  fra- 
ternity, like  every  link  that  drew  the  lands  together,  was  a  blessing 
and  not  a  curse.  And  though  the  new  world  we  dream  of  may  de- 
lay to  come,  yet  the  bad  old  world  can  never  quite  return.  Seven 
crusades  to  the  Holy  Land  have  all  meant  massacre  for  the  Jews ;  if 
the  Eighth  Crusade  is  to  mean  Palestine  for  the  Jews,  if  it  is  to  be 
truly  a  Christian  Crusade,  then  that  very  fact  is  a  proof  of  a  new 
world-order  of  love  and  justice.  Why  then  should  we  Jews,  the 
people  of  Isaiah,  at  such  a  turning-point  in  history,  nourish  that 
crude  and  cynical  view  of  nationality  which  regards  every  nation  as 
necessarily  the  enemy  of  every  other?  Let  us  rather  make  a  great 
act  of  faith,  and  instead  of  disavowing  the  brotherhood  of  Israel  let 
us  proclaim  —  from  our  Jerusalem  centre  —  the  brotherhood  of 
man. 

"  But  this  spiritual  work  is  not  all  that  calls  to  us.  For  Palestine 
is  not  like  those  rich  southern  plains  on  which  the  Hun  is  again 
descending.  It  is  a  place  full  of  stones  and  fever.  It  is  a  land 
whose  main  bulk  lies  almost  as  desolate  as  the  plains  of  Flanders ; 
ruined  not  by  German  war  but  by  Turkish  peace,  by  centuries  of 
neglect  and  misgovernment.  With  the  depletion  of  the  world's  re- 
sources, and  especially  of  the  world's  man-power,  by  this  terrible 
war,  who  is  to  win  the  country  for  civilisation  if  not  we  Jews? 
Even  if  we  had  no  historic  connection  with  it,  that  would  be  a 
worthy  mission  for  a  people.  Let  me  appeal  therefore  to  the  Brit- 
ish Jews  to  work  with  us  and  to  work  loyally.  For  even  at  the 
best  the  goal  is  far.  Palestine  is  not  yet  ours,  and  even  when  it  is, 
our  work  —  despite  the  pioneers  we  shall  always  honour  —  despite 
even  Baron  Edmond  de  Rothschild,  to  whom  Palestine  stands  eter- 
nally indebted  —  will  only  begin.  Already  under  the  oegis  of  Eng- 
land our  young  men  have  died  there.  And  we  mourn  these  heroes 
of  our  blood.  But  eagerly  as  our  young  men  have  sacrificed  them- 
selves in  Palestine  for  war,  still  more  eagerly  will  they  offer  them- 
selves there  for  the  labours  and  sacrifices  of  peace.  That  will  be 
the  true  Jewish  regiment. 

85 


THE  VOICE  OP  JEKUSALEM 

"  This  is  no  time,  my  friends,  for  rejoicing.  Jewish  legend  re- 
bukes the  Israelites  for  rejoicing  even  over  the  drowning  of  the 
Egyptians  in  the  Red  Sea.  '  How  can  you  sing,'  God  asks  His 
praising  angels,  '  when  my  people  are  perishing?  '  And  to-day  not 
only  our  enemies  are  perishing  but  our  friends  and  brothers.  But 
though  we  may  not  rejoice,  yet  amid  all  this  unparalleled  destruc- 
tion, when  the  sea  is  strewn  with  murdered  leviathans,  when  ghastly 
shell-holes  gape  where  once  were  pleasant  pastures,  when  unsightly 
rubbish-heaps  are  all  that  is  left  of  ancient  beautiful  cities,  it  is  a 
happy  change  to  look  forward  to  our  work  of  reconstruction,  of  re- 
generation, to  our  task  of  making  the  wilderness  blossom  as  the  rose, 
and  the  desert  flow  again  with  milk  and  honey. 

"  And  though  our  goal  be  yet  far,  yet  already  when  I  recall  how 
our  small  nation  sustained  the  mailed  might  of  all  the  great  Empires 
of  antiquity,  how  we  saw  our  Temple  in  flames  and  were  scattered 
like  its  ashes,  how  we  endured  the  long  night  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
illumined  by  the  glare  of  our  martyrs'  fires,  how  but  yesterday  we 
wandered  in  our  millions,  torn  between  the  ruthless  Prussian  and  the 
pitiless  Russian,  yet  have  lived  to  see  to-day  the  bloody  Empire  of 
the  Czars  dissolve,  and  the  mountains  of  Zion  glimmer  on  the  hor- 
izon, already  I  feel  we  may  say  to  the  nations :  Comfort  ye,  comfort 
ye,  too,  poor  suffering  peoples.  Learn  from  the  long  patience  of 
Israel  that  the  spirit  is  mightier  than  the  sword,  and  that  the  seer 
who  foretold  his  people's  resurrection  was  not  less  prophetic  when 
he  proclaimed  also  for  all  peoples  the  peace  of  Jerusalem" 


XVII 

The  two  formal  articles  devoted  later  in  this  book  to  the 
project  of  a  Jewish  State,  both  written  subsequently  to  Mr. 
Balfour's  Declaration,  which  closed  the  first  stage  of  Zionism, 
will  bring  the  reader's  knowledge  of  the  subject  up  to  date. 
But  some  extracts  here  from  my  multifarious  articles  in  the 
Dark  Ages  of  Zionism  will  make  clear  why  the  glittering  Zion 
of  my  peroration  is  already  proving  a  mirage  —  that  "  mockery 
of  Jewish  aspiration  "  which  despite  the  festal  atmosphere  I 
could  not  but  forebode. 

Thus  in  an  article  written  in  1900  Zionism  is  desiderated  for 
its  forcing  of  the  issue  which  Jochanan  ben  Zakkai  evaded,  and 
which  has  remained  still  in  suspension. 

"  Apart  from  its  political  working,  Zionism  forces  upon  the  Jew  a 
question  the  Jew  hates  to  face. 

"  Without  a  rallying  centre,  geographical  or  spiritual;  without  a 
Sanhedrin;  without  any  principle  of  unity  or  of  political  action; 
without  any  common  standpoint  about  the  old  Book;  without  the 

86 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

old  cement  of  dietary  laws  and  traditional  ceremonies ;  without  even 
ghetto-walls  built  by  his  friend,  the  enemy;  it  is  impossible  for 
Israel  to  persist  further,  except  by  a  miracle  —  of  stupidity. 

"  It  is  a  wretched  thing  for  a  people  to  be  saved  only  by  its  per- 
secutors or  its  fools.  As  a  religion.  Judaism  has  still  magnificent 
possibilities,  but  the  time  has  come  when  it  must  be  de-nationalised 
or  re-nationalised." 

But  with  the  hybrid  situation  in  a  British-Arab-Jewish  State 
the  Jew  will  neither  be  nationalised  nor  de-nationalised,  he  will 
still  go  on  impaling  himself  on  both  horns  of  a  dilemma  more 
tragic  than  Hamlet's  alternative,  and  asking  himself  how  to  be 
and  not  to  be.  I  expressed  the  same  thought  in  the  now  extinct 
New  Liberal  Review.  In  an  article  on  "  The  Return  to  Pales- 
tine "  written  nearly  twenty  years  ago,  I  found  the  final  justifi- 
cation of  the  Zionist  movement  in  this  clarification  of  the 
situation :  — 

"  Not  to  re-nationalise  Judaism  now  is  for  ever  to  r/e-nationalise 
it.  There  is  a  tide  in  the  affairs  of  nations  as  well  as  of  men,  which 
omitted,  '  all  the  voyage  of  their  life  is  bound  in  shallows  and  in 
miseries.'  A  nation  cannot  perpetually  divide  its  prayers  from  its 
practice.  The  crucial  moment  in  the  long  life  of  Israel  has  arrived 
—  in  the  slow  travail  of  the  ages  and  the  evolution  of  the  modern 
world  —  and  the  Jew  stands  at  the  parting  of  ways  that  no  longer 
permit  one  foot  on  each.  Either  he  must  consent  to  be  merely  a 
member  of  an  international  religious  community  welcoming  the 
whole  world  to  Abraham's  bosom,  or  he  must  at  last  obey  the  trum- 
pet call  of  Isaiah :  '  Go  through,  go  through  the  gates ;  prepare  ye 
the  way  of  the  people :  cast  up,  cast  up  the  highway :  gather  out  the 
stones:  lift  up  a  standard  for  the  people.'  " 

Zionism  will  have  no  such  power.  The  poor  footsore,  home- 
less hordes  cannot  "  go  through  the  gates."  The  British 
Administration  with  its  Gradgrind  ideals  of  respectability  and 
self-supportingness  will  bar  them  out.  "  Slow  and  sure  "  is  the 
sapient  motto.  But  desperation  is  a  surer  nation-builder  than 
canniness  and  political  economy.  And  Bacon's  maxim  "  Delays 
are  dangerous  "  is  wiser  than  the  popular  adage.  "  The  task 
is  difficult,"  I  wrote  in  the  same  article,  "  more  difficult,  perhaps, 
than  any  in  human  history  —  beset  with  more  theological  and 
political  pitfalls,  unique  in  its  problem  of  migration.  But  the 
very  greatness  of  the  task  should  stimulate  the  most  maligned 
of  races  to  break  the  desolate  monotony  of  this  brutal  modern 
world  by  the  splendour  of  an  antique  idealism."  (Another 
pre-war  side-light!)  And  I  defined  this  task  as  of  an  origi- 
nality congruous  with  the  uniqueness  of  the  Jew's  whole  history, 

87 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

for  whereas  motherlands  had  always  created  colonies,  here 
colonies  were  to  create  —  or  rather  re-create  —  a  motherland. 
But  alas !  the  Palestine  that  is  to  be  created  under  the  "  Man- 
date "  will  be  —  like  all  the  other  lands  of  Israel's  sojourn  — 
not  a  motherland  but  a  stcpmotherland. 

The  trouble  conies  from  the  large  existing  population, 
roughly  classified  as  Arab,  about  600,000  in  number.  If 
Poland  protests  that  14  per  cent,  of  Jews  constitute  too  great 
an  alloy  for  a  nationality  to  bear,  how  then  establish  a 
"  National  Home  "  in  face  of  an  alien  86  per  cent.  ?  Oliver 
Wendell  Holmes's  parable  of  the  nictitating  membrane  of 
birds,  which  excludes,  not  all  light,  but  just  as  much  light  as 
the  bird  wishes  to  exclude,  was  never  better  illustrated  than  in 
the  wilful  myopia  cultivated  by  official  Zionism  towards  this 
aspect  of  its  problem,  and  Mr.  Balfour,  with  the  same  blind- 
ness, or  the  same  blandness,  skirted  the  difficulty  by  premising 
the  equal  rights  and  privileges  of  this  population,  as  though 
this  was  not  cancelling  the  very  "  Jewish  National  Home  "  he 
professed  to  be  conceding. 

XVHI 

Here  a  personal  confession  is  necessary.  Mine  is  not  in  the 
racial  sense  anima  naturaUter  Judaica.  At  the  time  Dr.  Herzl 
did  me  the  honour  to  beseech  my  services  I  stood  at  the  opposite 
pole  of  thought  to  him.  Anti-Semitism  alone  had  made  him 
race-conscious,  and  he  defined  himself  as  "  a  Jew  by  the  grace 
of  Stocker."  He  had  drawn  from  the  Dreyfus  case  —  which 
was  the  inspiration  of  his  movement  —  the  conclusion  that  a 
settled  and  dignified  life  for  the  Jew  would  never  be  possible  in 
Christendom.  I,  on  the  contrary,  had  drawn  from  it  the  con- 
clusion that  Zola  was  essentially  a  Jew  and  that  in  the  organisa- 
tion  of  such  lovers  of  justice  throughout  the  world  and  in  co- 
operation with  them  lay  the  true  path  of  Israel,  his  true  mission. 
Dr.  Herzl,  though  an  incarnation  of  all  that  is  best  in  the 
Jewish  type,  was  curiously  ignorant  of  Judaism  and  content  to 
accept  a  Jew  as  a  phenomenon  purely  biological.  If  in  the  end 
I  endorsed  his  political  conception,  it  was  partly  because  of 
sympathy  with  a  great  man  who  was  being  misprized,  abused, 
misunderstood,  and  little  supported,  and  partly  because  I  saw 
there  was  no  real  contradiction  between  the  spiritual  ideal  and  a 
definite  locale  for  it;  which  locale  could  be  at  once  a  land  of 
refuge  for  the  oppressed  and  a  working  model  of  a  socially  just 

88 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

commonwealth.  I  set  myself  therefore  to  establish  for  the 
intelligentsia  a  rational  basis  for  the  movement  that  with  the 
masses  was  instinctive.  Answering  the  objections  of  the  anti- 
Zionists  who  preached  "  the  Jewish  mission "  without  ever 
carrying  it  out,  and  who  used  it  merely  as  a  stick  to  beat  the 
Zionists  with ;  replying  also  to  those  who  professed  that  Zionism 
was  a  reactionary  narrowness  when  the  Jewish  ideal  should  be 
international,  I  said  in  a  speech  made  in  1903 : 

"  Bonnie  Prince  Charlie,  the  Stuart  pretender,  scribbled  upon  a 
paper  preserved  at  Windsor :  '  To  live  and  not  to  live  is  worse  than 
th  die.'  That  is  our  position.  I  had  rather  we  died,  and  were 
done  with.  I  thank  Heaven  that  ten  tribes  at  least  were  lost. 
What  our  preachers  and  teachers  really  preach  is  that  the  mission 
of  Israel  is  submission,  for  never  do  they  set  up  our  own  ideal  —  our 
supposed  mission  of  Peace  and  Brotherhood  upon  earth.  Let  war 
break  out,  and  we  are  the  noisiest  singers  of  war-songs.  The  poor 
people  of  Kischineff  tried  to  save  themselves  by  putting  in  their 
windows  sacred  Russian  images.  It  is  our  history  in  a  nut-shell. 
In  moments  of  danger  we  put  up  the  flag  of  the  enemy.  And  it 
avails  nothing  in  the  long  run  —  the  image-imitators  at  Kischineff 
were  the  people  particularly  chosen  for  crucifixion.  But  we  are 
told  Zionism  is  against  pure  Jewish  principles  —  against  the  prin- 
ciples of  our  greatest  prophets.  Why,  there  never  were  such  nation- 
alists as  our  prophets.  And  there  never  were  such  internationalists, 
either.  Only  they  saw  that  internationalism  must  be  rooted  in  na- 
tionalism, that  there  cannot  be  a  brotherhood  of  peoples  without 
peoples  to  be  brothers.  Before  I  can  have  a  brother,  there  must  be 
a  '  me  '  to  have  a  brother.     It  takes  two  to  make  one  brother. 

"  Nationality  is  the  personality  of  peoples.  When  we  have  a 
country  of  our  own,  we  can  begin  to  talk  brotherhood.  It  comes  too 
suspiciously  from  a  people  without  one.  It  is  like  a  Schnorrer  talk- 
ing socialism.  The  fox  that  lost  his  tail  would  have  better  per- 
suaded his  fellow  foxes  of  the  disadvantages  of  a  tail  in  the  days 
when  he  had  still  his  glorious  waving  brush.  '  Be  at  the  tail  of  the 
lions  rather  than  at  the  head  of  the  foxes/  said  the  Rabbis.  Be  at 
the  tail  of  the  nations  rather  than  at  the  head  of  the  gipsies.  We 
stand  for  Peace  —  but  a  proposal  of  universal  disarmament  would 
have  more  weight  coming  from  Germany  than  from  Monaco.  Let 
Park  Lane  preach  against  luxurious  dinner  parties,  and  Society  may 
listen.  But  the  gospel  of  plain  living  and  high  thinking  cannot  be 
effectively  proclaimed  from  Rowton  House  by  tramps  cooking  their 
own  bloaters.  If  we  want  the  nations  to  listen  to  us,  we  must  first 
get  them  to  respect  us.  To  fulfil  the  ideals  of  our  prophets,  we 
must  have  a  soil  of  our  own ;  to  preach  them,  we  must  have  a  house- 
top of  our  own ;  to  show  the  world  a  model  State,  it  must  stand  in  a 

89 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

land  of  our  own,  not  in  a  land  where  we  must  —  under  peril  of  our 
life  or  what  is  worse,  our  position  in  society  —  hang  out  the  sacred 
images  of  our  neighbours.  It  is  not  as  if  the  anti-Zionists  were 
really  international,  were  really  cosmopolitan.  On  the  contrary 
they  arc  narrowly  national,  narrowly  metropolitan. 

"  I  do  not  complain  —  it  is  impossible  to  belong  to  two  peoples, 
and  the  Jews  of  each  country  naturally  choose  the  people  they  live 
amid.  You  will  say  the  Jews  have  managed  for  eighteen  centuries 
to  belong  to  two  peoples.  But  this  is  a  delusion.  So  long  as  they 
were  kept  in  Ghettos,  physical  and  moral,  they  belonged  to  one 
people,  their  own.  As  soon  as  they  are  let  out  of  their  protective 
prison,  the  stronger,  larger  people  sucks  them  in,  and  in  three  gen- 
erations assimilates  them  to  itself,  even  if  they  keep  up  the  farce  of 
marrying  among  themselves.  It  is  absurd  of  the  anti-Zionists  to 
claim  cosmopolitanism.  Mr.  Claude  Montefiore  preaches  a  British 
war-sermon:  his  sister,  Mrs.  Lucas,  writes  a  beautiful  patriotic 
poem,  '  Mother  England,'  which  is  sung  in  Jewish  schools.  Na- 
tionalism is  low  and  narrow  when  it  is  '  Mother  Zion,'  but  when  it 
is  '  Mother  England,'  ah,  that  is  another  story. 

'  For  the  Jew  has  heart  and  hand,  our  mother  England, 
And  they  both  are  thine  to-day. 
Thine  for  life  and  thine  for  death,  yea  thine  for  ever.' 

It  is  a  fine  emotion,  and  England  deserves  it  of  us,  and  our  lives  are 
at  her  call.  But  I  do  not  find  it  any  higher  than  the  older  senti- 
ment, '  If  I  forget  thee,  O  Jerusalem,  may  my  right  hand  forget  its 
cunning.'  An  old  Jewish  legend  makes  Jeremiah  after  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  Temple  see  a  lonely  woman  sitting  on  the  top  of  a  moun- 
tain, dressed  in  black,  her  hair  dishevelled.  '  Who  will  comfort 
me?  '  she  is  crying.  Jeremiah  approaches  and  says,  '  If  thou  art  a 
ghost,  begone.'  She  answers,  'Dost  thou  not  know  me?  I  am 
Mother  Zion.'  Twenty-five  centuries  have  passed,  and  still  she 
weeps  over  her  children.  But  only  in  these  latter  generations  has 
she  heard  herself  ousted  from  her  motherhood,  has  she  endured  the 
last  sorrow  of  hearing  her  little  ones  sing  of  '  Mother  England.' 
Ah,  how  she  must  puzzle  her  poor  brain;  for  here  she  hears  them 
singing  '  Rule  Britannia  '  and  there  '  the  Marseillaise,'  and  yonder 
'  Die  Wacht  am  R lit  in.'  She  has  heard  some  singing  all  three  in 
turn,  Anglicised  Alsatians.  The  one  song  it  is  narrow  to  sing  is  the 
song  we  sing  at  Zionist  Meetings,  the  Hatikvah,  the  song  of  na- 
tional hope.  Three  things  in  England  have  the  word  '  National  ' 
particularly  attached  to  them.  There  is  the  National  Bard,  Shake- 
speare, and  his  prophet  is  Mr.  Israel  Gollancz;  there  is  the  Diction- 
ary of  National  Biography,  .and  the  editor  is  Mr.  Sidney  Lee;  there 
is  the  National  Theatre.  Drury  Lane,  and  the  manager  is  Mr. 
Arthur  Collins.     Jews  say  we  could  not  run  a  country  of  our  own, 

90 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

but  I  cannot  believe  that  even  in  Palestine  the  nationalistic  talents 
of  these  gentlemen  would  be  utterly  barren.  For  many  generations 
only  one  saint's  day  has  been  added  to  the  British  calendar,  and 
that  is  Primrose  Day.  British  Imperialism  was  shaped  by  a  Jew- 
ish politician,  and  I  do  not  quite  despair  of  our  being  able  to  pro- 
duce capable  rulers  even  for  a  tiny  territory  of  our  own.  While  we 
say  that  we  could  not  live  together  under  Home  Rule,  that  we  are 
lower  than  the  Red  Indians  or  the  Esquimaux,  the  ants  and  the  bees, 
everybody  else  says:  '  Good  heavens!  If  these  people  should  only 
get  together,  if  they  should  find  out  their  own  power !  '  We  are 
supposed  to  be  a  clever  race  —  but  that  is  a  libel.  We  are  clever 
as  individuals,  but  as  a  people  we  rank  below  the  Hottentots.  If 
there  is  one  thing  that  an  individual  Jew  thinks  of,  even  more  than 
he  should,  it  is  Tachlith  —  the  end,  the  ultimate  goal.  '  What  does 
it  lead  to?  '  he  asks.  If  there  is  one  thing  that  the  Jewish  people 
have  forgotten  —  it  is  Tachlith. 

"  Drift,  drift,  drift,  in  poverty,  hunger  and  dirt.  To  fly  from  one 
country  to  another ;  to  stave  off"  things  from  one  day  to  another !  A 
great  deal  of  our  charity  consists  in  sending  poor  people  from  Man- 
chester to  London  and  then  sending  them  back  from  London  to 
Manchester.  Our  Boards  of  Guardians  enjoy  this  game  of  shuttle- 
cock —  it  gives  them  a  great  air  of  activity.  A  country  is  a  respon- 
sibility, no  doubt.  You  may  have  to  fight  for  it.  But  now  you  are 
conscripts  to  Russia,  to  Germany,  to  all  the  world.  In  the  battle 
of  KischinefF  alone,  your  casualties,  even  according  to  the  official 
account,  were  45  killed  and  424  wounded,  with  700  horses  and  600 
shops  looted.  The  loss  of  property  is  £500,000,  which  we  have  to 
make  good.  And  though  I  give  my  mite,  I  give  it  grudgingly,  be- 
cause it  is  stolen  from  Zionism,  and  because  I  feel  the  bill  for  dam- 
ages should  be  paid  by  the  rich  anti-Zionist  Jews  of  St.  Petersburg 
and  Riga,  the  Jewish  Russians.  The  Jewish  readers  of  one  New 
York  paper  have  subscribed  some  £15,000  towards  it  —  more  than 
they  have  ever  given  to  Zionism.  But  prevention  is  better  than 
cure.  Jewish  money  can  be  had  for  any  purpose,  except  a  Jewish 
purpose.  A  Jew,  last  week,  offered  thousands  of  pounds  for  a 
statue  to  Kosciuszko  —  the  Polish  hero  of  freedom.  It  was  refused 
as  an  insolence  coming  from  a  Jew.  He  did  not  seem  to  think  of 
supporting  his  own  heroes  of  freedom.  There  is  a  Jewish  lady  in 
London  who  gives  ten  thousand  a  year  to  a  musical  institution. 
There  is  no  Jew  in  the  world  who  has  given  Zionism  even  a  single 
ten  thousand.     But  then  it  is  so  sordid  to  buy  Palestine !  " 

Not  that  Palestine  was  essential  to  my  particular  conception 
of  Zionism.  For  Jerusalem,  like  Heaven,  is  more  a  state  of 
mind  that  a  place.  But  if  Palestine  was  to  be  chosen  as  the 
objective,  the  movement  must  come  to  grips  with  reality.  Pro- 
ceeding, I  said: 

91 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  My  friends,  you  cannot  buy  Palestine.  If  you  had  a  hundred 
millions,  you  could  only  buy  the  place  where  Palestine  once  stood. 
Palestineitself  you  must  re-create  by  labour,  till  it  flows  again  with 
milk  and  honey!  The  country  is  a  good  country  —  not  so  good  as 
Samuel  Montagu  said  before  he  became  a  Baronet,  not  so  bad  as  he 
says  it  is  now.  But  it  needs  a  great  irrigation  scheme.  To  return 
there  needs  no  miracle  —  already  a  part  of  the  population  are  Jews. 
If  the  Almighty  Himself  carried  the  rest  of  us  to  Palestine  by  a 
miracle,  what  should  we  gain  except  a  free  passage?  In  the  sweat 
of  our  brow  we  must  earn  our  Palestine.  And,  therefore,  the  day 
we  get  Palestine,  if  the  most  joyous,  will  also  be  the  most  terrible 
day  of  our  movement." 

This  "  most  joyous  day  "  has  been  celebrated  even  more  up- 
roariously than  I  anticipated,  but  the  realisation  that  it  was 
also  "  the  most  terrible  day  of  our  movement  "  was  confined  to 
few.  And  the  reason  was  that  the  movement  had  not  come  to 
grips  with  reality.  My  first  stroke  for  Zionism  a  quarter  of  a 
century  ago  had  been  to  insist  that  the  Jewish  Colonisation 
Association  which  administered  the  great  legacy  of  Baron  de 
Hirsch  must  devote  itself  to  Palestine  (and  this  is  now  largely 
to  be  done),  my  second  was  to  draw  up  a  report  on  "The 
Commercial  Future  of  Palestine  " —  a  country  then  veiled  in 
pietistic  clouds,  but  which  is  now  at  last  coming  under  normal 
scientific  investigation  and  development.  But  my  third  step  on 
the  road  of  reality  was  not  taken  —  so  far  as  documents  easily 
at  hand  testify  —  till  1904,  when  I  appear  to  have  become  fully 
aware  of  the  Arab  peril,  and  in  a  speech  made  in  New  York  to 
have  honestly  drawn  attention  to  it  as  the  outstanding  obstacle 
to  Zionism. 

"  There  is,  however,  a  difficulty  from  which  the  Zionist  dares  not 
avert  his  eyes,  though  he  rarely  likes  to  face  it.  Palestine  proper 
has  already  its  inhabitants.  The  pashalik  of  Jerusalem  is  already 
twice  as  thickly  populated  as  the  United  States,  having  fifty-two 
souls  to  every  square  mile,  and  not  25  per  cent,  of  them  Jews;  so  we 
must  be  prepared  either  to  drive  out  by  the  sword  the  tribes  in  pos- 
session as  our  forefathers  did,  or  to  grapple  with  the  problem  of  a 
large  alien  population,  mostly  Mohammedan  and  accustomed  for 
centuries  to  despise  us.  This  is  an  infinitely  graver  difficulty  than 
the  stock  anti-Zionist  taunt  that  nobody  would  go  to  Palestine  if  we 
got  it;  that  everybody  would  want  to  be  Ambassador  in  Paris;  a 
joke  that  rather  lost  its  point  in  the  Dreyfus  days." 

Here  is  the  crux  of  the  situation.     But  the  Zionists  did  avert 

their  eyes. 

92 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

In  an  article  on  "  Zionism  and  Territorialism  "  that  appeared 
in  the  Fortnightly  Review  in  1910,  I  find  myself  drawing  atten- 
tion not  only  to  the  overwhelming  presence  of  the  Arabs,  but 
to  their  hostility.  As  its  recent  flare-up  is  sometimes  traced  to 
my  suggestion  that  they  should  be  amicably  bought  out  (though 
Mr.  Barnes,  M.P.,  more  accurately  connects  it  with  the  far- 
trumpeted  British  promise  of  a  "  Jewish  National  Home  "  in 
their  territory),  it  is  as  well  to  cite  from  this  article  of  a 
decade  ago. 

"  Palestine,  with  its  paltry,  semi-sterile  area  of  10,000  square 
miles,  is  already  in  the  possession  of  600,000  Arabs  and  other  non- 
Jews,  so  that  it  would  require,  under  the  most  improbably  prosper- 
ous conditions,  half  a  century  of  peaceful  penetration  before  the 
Jews  could  even  be  on  an  equality  with  the  non-Jews.  Prior  to  the 
Turkish  Revolution,  it  is  just  conceivable  that  a  Jewish  Govern- 
ment might  have  ruled  Palestine  as  a  few  white  men  rule  Natal, 
but  under  the  new  constitution  the  only  local  autonomy  possible 
would  be  Arab. 

"  And  it  is  significant  that  an  Arab  candidate  for  Jerusalem  put 
upon  his  platform  the  enlargement  of  Palestine  into  a  vilayet,  so  as 
to  include  an  increased  Arab  population.  The  two  Arab  journals 
in  Palestine,  El  Emsayi  and  El  Karmel  (now  defunct),  were  both 
anti- Jewish  (the  pen  almost  slips  into  saying,  anti-Semitic).  More- 
over, the  seventy  Arab  deputies  in  the  Ottoman  Parliament  form  a 
league  for  the  defence  of  Arab  interests,  so  that,  for  example,  the 
member  for  Tripoli  joined  in  the  protest  against  the  concessions  to 
the  British  steamers  on  the  Tigris.  There  are  no  less  than  four 
Arab  journals  published  in  Cairo,  El  Lewan,  El  Moyad,  El  Dous- 
tour,  and  El  Minbar,  all  labouring  to  promote  the  Renaissance  of 
Islam,  and  their  articles  are  translated  by  the  Persian,  Indian,  and 
Tartar  journals,  while  a  group  of  Young  Arabs  in  Paris,  emulating 
the  Young  Turks,  have  likewise  an  organ  in  French.  The  12,000 
pupils  of  the  most  ancient  seminary  of  El-Azhar  in  Cairo,  hailing 
from  all  parts  of  the  Mussulman  world,  contribute  to  spread  every- 
where the  fear  lest  the  Jews  should  seize  Jerusalem,  that  sacred  city 
of  the  three  hundred  and  fifty  millions  of  Islam.  Still  fiercer  is  the 
opposition  of  the  Arab  Christians,  and  fiercest  of  all,  and  not  least 
formidable,  the  opposition  of  the  Ottoman  Jews,  whose  four  depu- 
ties in  Parliament  —  the  members  for  Baghdad,  Salonica,  Smyrna, 
and  Constantinople  —  are  all  violently  anti-Zionist." 

But  nothing  could  rouse  the  Zionists  to  cope  even  mentally 
with  the  situation.  Their  opponents  had  accused  them  of  "  try- 
ing to  force  the  hand  of  Providence."  In  regard  to  the  Arab 
problem  they  were  certainly  obnoxious  to  the  indictment.     Up 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

to  the  very  day  of  the  Balfour  pronouncement  they  remained 
blind  and  deaf  to  the  difficulty.  They  cast  their  burden  lazily 
upon  the  Lord. 

Hence  to-day  we  have  a  new  Arab  version  of  the  meaning  of 
Zionism,  which  may  take  its  place  among  the  many  curiosities 
of  definition  achieved  by  the  Zionists  to  keep  pace  with  their 
varying  fortunes.  "  Zionism,"  runs  a  letter  of  Abn  Gosh, 
endorsed  by  five  Mukhtars  and  forty-eight  sheikhs,  "  is  the  great 
school  which  the  British  Government  has  prepared  for  us,  that 
the  fellah  may  in  it  learn  the  art  of  agriculture  and  husbandry, 
and  the  source  of  economic  power." 

XIX 

Although  we  have  lately  been  fed  with  hopes  that  the  world 
will  be  run  as  a  commonwealth,  it  has  always  hitherto  been  run 
as  a  cockpit.  And  if  humanity  is  to  continue  to  live  under  the 
bad  old  order,  the  world  will  continue  to  be  a  cockpit.  And 
though  the  Jewish  ideal  is  to  turn  it  into  a  commonwealth,  the 
Jewish  race  cannot  in  the  meantime  —  unless  it  embrace  a 
wholly  passive  Christianity  and  subject  itself  voluntarily  to 
mass-murder  —  escape  the  conditions  of  the  cockpit,  or  the  need 
of  an  alliance  with  military  power. 

There  is  no  example  in  history  of  an  inhabited  country  being 
acquired  except  by  force.  Adam's  entry  into  the  Garden  of 
Eden  was  peaceful  because  there  was  no  other  man  in  occupa- 
tion. Jehovah  Himself,  according  to  the  Bible,  could  not  give 
the  Jews  Palestine  without  their  fighting  a  long  series  of  battles 
aganist  the  tribes  in  possession,  nor  did  they  ever  conquer  it 
wholly.  It  is  true  the  naked  doctrine  of  force  is  disavowed, 
for  the  whole  Bible  is  written  from  the  standpoint  that  God 
never  acts  —  nor  must  man  —  on  other  than  righteous  grounds. 
Thus  the  expulsion  of  the  natives  of  Palestine  is  ascribed  to 
their  abominations.  Nevertheless  without  force  righteousness 
alone  cannot  effect  the  conquest  of  a  country.  And  the  amount 
of  force  necessary  varies  with  the  number  of  its  inhabitants. 
When  the  German  Danes,  who  form  the  backbone  of  England, 
invaded  it  in  the  fifth  century,  they  had  to  kill  oft"  most  of  the 
ancient  Britons.  When  the  Pilgrim  Fathers  went  to  America, 
the  fighting  necessary  was  less,  though  there  was  for  generations 
war  to  the  knife,  or  rather  to  the  tomahawk.  In  my  own 
childhood   the   Maoris  were  fighting   against   the   whites   who, 

94 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

albeit  by  treaty,  had  possessed  themselves  of  New  Zealand.  A 
race,  therefore,  that  desires  a  land  of  its  own  must  —  if  it  sets 
its  eye  on  a  land  already  inhabited  —  be  prepared  to  face  war. 
We  lost  Palestine  after  some  of  the  fiercest  fighting  in  history. 
But  the  Zionists,  though  professedly  modern,  had  not  really  lost 
the  old  mystic  hope  that  it  would  be  got  back  without  force. 
And  this  though  the  united  strength  of  Christendom  in  a  series 
of  Crusades  had  not  availed  to  dispossess  the  Turk.  But  if  the 
Zionists  thus  naively  imagined  that  you  could  make  omelettes 
without  breaking  eggs,  the  eggs  that  have  already  been  broken 
in  Palestine  are  a  proof  that  history  has  not  yet  changed  her 
laws.  There  is  no  way  for  a  people  once  pushed  out  of  its 
country  to  push  in  again  unless  at  the  point  of  the  sword,  and 
even  this  is  impossible  with  a  scattered  people  unless  the  sword 
is  that  of  a  powerful  backer. 

The  only  chance  of  reconstructing  a  nationality  without  the 
sword  is  to  colonise,  as  the  Jewish  Territorial  Organisation 
projected,  an  unpopulated  territory.  It  was  because  I  fore- 
saw that  the  Palestine  problem  could  yield  only  to  force  that  my 
own  energies  have  been  diverted  for  so  many  years  to  the  quest 
for  a  comparatively  unoccupied  region,  sufficiently  large, 
healthy  and  fertile  to  contain  the  potentiality  of  a  Jewish  State. 
But  if  Palestine  is  put  forward  as  the  only  possible  place  — 
and  "  nur  Palastma  "  has  been  a  Zionist  catchword  —  then 
there  is  no  resource  but  in  Realpolitik;  in  accommodation  to  the 
cockpit.  And  when  the  whole  world  had  turned  into  one,  and 
the  Jew  was  fighting  everywhere  for  everybody,  and  when  more- 
over the  Turkish  Empire  bade  fair  to  be  in  the  melting-pot,  it 
did  seem  as  if,  with  so  much  of  Jewish  blood  being  shed,  the  Jew 
might  reap  the  same  reward  as  races  far  less  civilised  and  far 
less  oppressed.  More  particularly  when  the  cockpit  was  put 
forward  as  merely  the  preparation  for  the  commonwealth  in 
which  mankind  would  henceforth  live  happily  under  "  the  prin- 
ciple of  nationalities." 

Wherefore,  when  the  Great  War  was  raging,  I  suggested  in 
an  address  to  the  Fabian  Society  (December,  1915)  that  "if 
Britain  took  Palestine  she  could  make  no  greater  stroke  of 
policy  than  to  call  in  the  Jews  to  regenerate  it  for  her."  But, 
I  pointed  out,  their  mere  immigration  would  not  be  enough. 

"  It  all  requires  a  radically  imaginative  policy  —  a  dealing  in 
futures  as  well  as  in  pasts  by  men  ready  to  rescue  human  history 

95 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

from  its  monotonous  factors  of  blood  and  gold.  Napoleon,  under 
the  spell  of  the  forty  centuries  that  regarded  him  from  the  Pyra- 
mids, announced  his  design  to  restore  the  Jews  to  their  land.  Will 
England,  with  Egypt  equally  at  her  feet,  carry  out  the  plan  she 
foiled  Napoleon  in?  Had  she  the  power  and  the  genius  to  do  so, 
a  new  chapter  would  be  opened  in  the  history  of  mankind,  the  ends 
of  the  ages  would  meet,  and  the  '  tribe  of  the  wandering  foot  and 
weary  breast/  which  for  nineteen  hundred  years  has  prayed  for 
Palestine  some  twenty  times  a  day,  would  find  itself  on  its  holy  soil 
under  the  aegis  of  the  greatest  Empire  in  the  world,  victorious  after 
the  greatest  struggle  in  her  history." 

XX 

In  May,  1917,  in  an  article  in  a  popular  magazine,  I  returned 
to  the  scheme  of  a  British  Palestine  (which  the  British  Govern- 
ment adopted  that  very  November  in  a  disingenuous  form).  It 
will  be  seen  that  I  even  named  the  very  man  who  has  been 
appointed  High  Commissioner. 

"  It  is  significant,"  I  wrote,  "  that  the  Zionist  movement,  despite 
the  part  played  by  Austrian  and  German  Jews  in  its  inception,  has 
always  regarded  England  as  its  '  spiritual  home.'  In  the  very 
shadow  of  the  Mansion  House  it  set  up  its  financial  institution  — 
the  Jewish  Colonial  Trust  —  and  here,  under  the  seal  of  English 
Law,  it  organised  its  Statutes.  And  the  British  order  and  success 
which  Dr.  Herzl  witnessed  in  Egypt  convinced  him  that  under  the 
aegis  of  Britain,  which  alone  understands  to  leave  other  races  to 
their  own  Kultur,  the  dream  of  a  Jewish  State  had  the  best  chance 
of  achieving  substance.  Peopled  by  a  stock  to  whose  patriotism  and 
vigour  —  after  two  thousand  years  of  repression  —  the  honours 
lists  of  all  the  belligerent  armies  testify,  and  to  whose  intellectual 
and  artistic  energy  the  libraries,  theatres,  academies  and  senates  of 
the  world  bear  overwhelming  witness —  British  Judaea,  governed  by 
a  Jew  already  tried  and  tested  in  the  service  of  Britain  —  a  Her- 
bert Samuel,  an  Edwin  Montagu,  a  Sir  Lionel  Abrahams,  a  Sir 
Matthew  Nathan  —  would  become  not  the  least  glorious  or  loyal 
link  in  that  mighty  chain  of  Imperial  Britain  which  binds  together 
so  many  races,  creeds  and  colours. 

"  Unfortunately,"  I  went  on,  "  all  human  schemes  have  their  ob- 
stacles and  these  "come  as  usual  from  within  as  well  as  from  without. 
The  one  serious  difficulty,  however,  is  internal.  '  Give  the  country 
without  a  people,'  magnanimously  pleaded  Lord  Shaftesbury,  '  to 
the  people  without  a  country.'  Alas,  it  was  a  misleading  mistake. 
The  country  holds  600,000  Arabs.  And  despite  the  homesickness 
for  Zion  which,  beginning  in  the  eighties  and  intensified  by  the  po- 

06 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

groms,  drew  the  intellectuals  of  Russian  and  Roumanian  Jewry  to 
Palestine  and  set  them  —  in  the  dearth  of  ploughs  —  tearing  at  the 
sacred  soil  with  their  fingers ;  despite  the  thirty  Jewish  Colonies 
with  their  picturesque  nomenclature  — '  The  Gate  of  Hope,'  '  The 
Memorial  of  Jacob/  '  The  Watch  on  the  Jordan,'  etc.,  etc. —  and 
their  still  more  picturesque  vines  and  orange-trees,  the  total  area 
of  Palestine  yet  acquired  is  not  2  per  cent.,  nor  did  the  Jewish 
population  —  even  before  the  great  exodus  or  expulsion  due  to  the 
war  —  exceed  100,000.  And  even  of  these  100,000  the  majority 
were  old  men,  who  went  to  Palestine  not  to  live,  but  to  die;  not  to 
work,  but  to  weep  at  the  ruined  Wall  of  the  Temple.  This  role  of 
Palestine  as  a  monastery  is  not  indeed  so  despicable  as  the  modern 
Jew  too  often  assumes.  The  Jew  at  the  Wailing  Wall  is  a  more 
poetic  figure  than  the  Jew  on  Wall  Street.  But  he  does  not  help  to 
rebuild  the  Wall.  That  can  only  be  done  by  a  stalwart  peasantry 
growing  up  on  the  soil.  And  unfortunately  the  soil  is  occupied  by 
the  Arab.  Thus,  unless  the  Jews  are  to  begin  their  new  life  by 
massacring  the  modern  Canaanites  —  which  is  out  of  the  question  — 
Zionism  must,  it  would  seem,  remain  largely  moonshine.  For  even 
under  constitutional  government  for  all  inhabitants,  there  would  be, 
not  a  Jewish  autonomy  but  an  Arab  autonomy.  There  might  at 
best  be  a  condominium  of  Arabs  and  Jews,  but  it  would  be  fruitful 
in  friction.  In  any  event  the  Jews  would  be  swamped  and  the 
Jewish  atmosphere  —  the  paramount  object  of  the  great  experi- 
ment —  would  become  less  distinctive  than  in  the  Ghetto  of  New 
York. 

"  The  only  solution  of  this  difficulty  lies  in  the  consideration  that 
Palestine  is  not  so  much  occupied  by  the  Arabs  as  over-run  by  them. 
They  are  nomads,  who  have  created  in  Palestine  neither  material 
nor  spiritual  values.  To  treat  them  therefore  on  the  same  basis  as, 
say,  the  Belgians,  would  be  to  follow  an  analogy  which  does  not 
exist.  Politics  is  not  all  of  a  piece,  else  the  very  idea  of  giving  Pal- 
estine to  a  race  which  is  not  yet  there,  and  whose  '  vested  interests  ' 
in  the  land  are  only  spiritual  and  historic,  would  be  a  paradox.  Yet 
this  paradox  appealed  to  that  eminently  practical  politician,  Napol- 
eon, and  only  his  defeat  by  Britain  prevented  his  re-settling  the  Jews 
in  their  old  home.  The  whirligig  of  history  thus  presents  England 
with  the  opportunity  of  carrying  out  the  very  plan  she  indirectly 
thwarted.  Like  Napoleon  and  the  American  millionaires,  we  must 
'  deal  in  futures.'  We  cannot  allow  the  Arabs  to  block  so  valuable  a 
piece  of  historic  reconstruction,  so  romantic  a  reparation  to  the  sore- 
ly-tried race  of  the  Apostles.  And  therefore  we  must  gently  per- 
suade them  to  '  trek.'  After  all,  they  have  all  Arabia  with  its  million 
square  miles  —  not  to  mention  the  vast  new  area  freed  from  the  Turk 
between  Syria  and  Mesopotamia  —  and  Israel  has  not  a  square  inch. 
There  is  no  particular  reason  for  the  Arabs  to  cling  to  these  few  kil- 
ometres.    '  To  fold  their  tents  '  and  '  silently  steal  away  '  is  their 

97 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

proverbial  habit:  let  them  exemplify  it  now.  The  Jews  will  be  well 
content  to  pay  their  travelling  expenses,  and  to  buy  also  —  at  a 
price  fixed  by  the  British  Government  —  such  holdings  and  build- 
ings as  really  have  a  value.  Nor  would  the  Jews  be  reluctant  to 
negotiate  equally  with  the  German  colonists.  Not  that  there  would 
not  be  absolute  toleration  of  all  faiths  and  races;  with  a  Jewish 
guard  of  honour  round  the  Tomb  of  Christ,  if  the  holy  places  were 
not  —  as  Dr.  Herzl  suggested  — '  exterritorialised.'  But  it  is  obvi- 
ously pointless  to  pour  water  into  a  sieve,  or  a  pint  of  wine  into  a 
gallon  of  oil.  The  Jews  in  Palestine,  if  a  minority,  must  either 
dominate  the  majority  or  be  dominated  by  it.  Either  alternative 
would  be  undesirable:  neither  would  be  the  dream  that  has  sweet- 
ened the  centuries  of  sorrow." 


XXI 

When  at  a  dark  moment  in  the  fortunes  of  England  Mr. 
Balfour  had  at  last  come  out  with  his  Declaration  —  diplomatic 
to  the  point  of  meaninglessness  —  but  acutely  timed  and  so 
phrased  as  to  play  on  the  popular  belief  in  the  Restoration  of 
the  Jews,  I  set  myself  in  a  Sunday  paper  that  counts  its  readers 
by  the  million  to  allay  the  emotions  he  had  aroused,  deliberately 
entitling  my  article,  "  The  Future  of  Palestine,"  not  of 
Zionism. 

"  In  many  Jewish  and  Christian  circles,"  I  wrote  in  March,  1918, 
"there  is  joy  —  and  in  not  a  few,  apprehension  —  at  the  prospect 
of  a  Jewish  Palestine. 

"  The  alarm  is  at  its  keenest  among  Mohammedans  and  British 
Jews.     But  there  is  as  yet  little  ground  either  for  alarm  or  ecstasy. 

"  True,  the  British  Government  has  pledged  itself  to  support  the 
establishment  of  a  '  Jewish  National  Home '  in  the  Holy  Land. 
But  in  the  same  breath  it  has  added  a  proviso  which  practically  re- 
duces the  promise  to  a  contradiction  in  terms. 

"  For  '  nothing  shall  be  done  which  may  prejudice  the  civil  and 
religious  rights  of  existing  non-Jewish  communities  in  Palestine.' 
It  is  as  if  the  Government  should  give  over  the  Savoy  to  a  new 
department  on  condition  the  hotel  guests  should  not  be  disturbed. 

"  The  Jews  in  pre-war  Palestine  —  and  there  is  reason  to  think 
the  ratio  has  even  fallen  —  were  only  one  in  seven  of  the  inhabit- 
ants ;  they  held  only  2  per  cent,  of  the  soil.  The  non-Jewish  pop- 
ulation, some  600,000  in  number,  embraced  —  apart  from  the  Ger- 
man colonies  and  the  Christian  missions,  churches  and  institutions  — 
Arabs.  Syrians,  Druses,  Algerians,  Egyptians,  Bulgarians  and  con- 
siderable settlements  of  Moslem  Circassians  transplanted  from  Rus- 

98 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

sia   by   the   Sultan.     Of   these  the  native   Syrians,   predominantly 
Arab  by  blood,  are  by  far  the  most  numerous. 

"  Some  of  these  mutually  exclusive  tribes  may  perhaps  be  re- 
garded as  semi-nomadic  and  not  irrevocably  rooted  in  the  soil.  But 
unless  the  problem  of  re-establishing  the  Jewish  State  is  solved  by 
bold  constructive  politics,  Palestine,  already,  moreover,  overlaid  by 
the  historic  deposits  of  Christendom  and  Islam,  cannot  possibly  be- 
come the  cradle  of  a  '  Jewish  national '  life  in  any  real  political 
sense. 

"  Still  less  can  it  become  a  Jewish  '  home.'  The  Jews  of  the 
world  number  some  fourteen  millions.  Wales,  which  is  three-quar- 
ters of  the  size  of  Palestine,  and  possesses  mineral  wealth  and  in- 
dustrial opportunities  lacking  in  the  Holy  Land,  provides  a  '  home  ' 
for  only  two  million  inhabitants.  Palestine  at  its  zenith  probably 
supported  but  three  millions,  and,  even  assuming  that  this  number 
could  regather  and  the  Arabs  trek  in  our  own  generation,  there 
would  still  be  over  ten  million  Jews  outside. 

"  All,  therefore,  that  will  certainly  happen  is  that  Palestine  will 
profit  by  the  wave  of  irreflective  idealism  known  as  Zionism,  and  that 
this  derelict  land,  paralysed  for  four  centuries  by  the  dead  hand 
of  the  Turk,  will  revive  and  blossom  out  again  under  the  uncom- 
mercial  devotion   of   Jewish   capital   and   labour. 

"  For  Palestine  cannot  '  pay.'  And  it  is  fortunate  for  the 
world  that  at  a  period  when  food  production  is  of  such  paramount 
importance,  and  when  the  general  resources  are  mortgaged  to  the 
regeneration  of  the  war-ruined  lands,  there  should  exist  this  peculiar 
Jewish  passion  for  irrigating,  sanitating,  canalising,  populating  and 
cultivating  this  feverous  but  once  fertile  area. 

"  Never  naturally  a  land  '  flowing  with  milk  and  honey,'  Palestine 
will  now  have  its  ancient  dams,  aqueducts  and  hill  terraces  restored, 
its  malarious  marshes  drained  and  fenced  with  eucalyptus,  and  the 
olive  groves,  so  fecklessly  destroyed  by  Arab  goats  and  Turkish 
misgovernment,  replanted. 

"  Again  the  green  bay  tree  shall  flourish  like  the  wicked,  there 
will  once  more  be  balm  in  Gilead,  and  Jericho,  the  Biblical  '  city  of 
palm  trees,'  the  last  of  which  perished  in  1838,  will  renew  its  palmy 
days.  Doubtless,  too,  there  will  be  modern  developments  less 
pleasing  to  contemplate. 

"  Moreover,  with  the  economic  evolution  in  Jewish  hands,  and 
expressing  itself  doubtless  by  a  unified  Jewish  currency  and  postal 
system  —  there  were  six  postal  systems  and  several  chaotic  curren- 
cies before  the  war  —  this  cohesive  political  minority  will  tend  to 
give  the  new  Arab  State  a  Jewish  colour,  while  their  intensified  his- 
toric consciousness,  accentuated  from  without  by  the  host  of  ab- 
sentee Zionists,  and  from  within  by  the  streams  of  Jewish  visitors, 
will  co-operate  to  prevent  them  being  swamped  and  Arabised  by  the 
majority. 

99 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

"  Some  such  Zionist  development  of  Palestine  is  one  of  the  few 
certainties  that  loom  through  the  fog  of  war.   .  .  . 

"  While  I  fear  that  the  love  of  Zion  may  be  tragically  blinding 
the  Jewish  people  to  its  last  chances  of  a  real  political  existence  on 
some  still  untenanted  expanse  of  Canada,  Brazil,  Asia  Minor  or  Si- 
beria, nevertheless  there  are  aspects  of  Zion  with  which  every  Jew, 
nay,  every  thinking  man,  must  sympathise.  The  Jewish  University, 
projected  on  a  site  already  donated  near  the  Mount  of  Olives,  will 
be  a  characteristic  commencement  for  a  nation  of  students;  while  the 
Medical  Faculty,  which  is  to  be  its  nucleus,  is  an  urgent  necessity  in 
a  land  where  trachoma  and  typhus  are  rampant,  and  where  cleanli- 
ness is  not  next  to  godliness. 

"  Still  more  in  keeping  would  be  the  building  of  a  Temple  of 
Peace  to  replace  the  discredited  institution  at  The  Hague.  The  ob- 
jection that  Jerusalem  is  too  remote  is  parochially  European.  The 
old  geographers  who  placed  Jerusalem  at  the  centre  of  the  globe 
were  wiser. 

"  With  our  new  '  orientation '  towards  our  brown  and  yellow 
brothers,  and  the  new  political  '  occidentation  '  of  India  and  Japan, 
Jerusalem  may  well  become  the  pivot  of  world-peace.  The  Hague 
Palace  was  an  artificial  structure,  without  traditions  or  reverbera- 
tions. In  the  Holy  City  of  three  great  religions  even  diplomatists 
might  find  cynicism  difficult,  and  our  poor  battered  humanity  might 
take  a  fresh  upward  impulse  of  faith  and  hope." 

XXII 

Even  this  article,  however,  was  too  optimistic,  for  there 
appears  to  be  no  intention  of  giving  Palestine  Jewry  such 
national  minima  as  the  postal  system  and  the  currency,  which  I 
took  for  granted.  In  my  speech  in  New  York  in  1904,  I  see 
that  I  prophetically  suggested  that  "  possibly  a  Conference  of 
the  Powers  may  one  day  pacify  their  mutual  jealousies  by 
putting  us  into  Palestine,"  and  warned  my  audience  that  "  if 
the  Turkish  Empire  is  broken  up,  or  if  the  Powers  help  us  to 
peaceful  possession,  we  shall  not  profit  by  the  contingency  unless 
we  are  united  in  Zionism.  The  car  will  come  our  way  and  wre 
shall  not  be  ready  to  jump  on."  "Who  knows,"  I  went  on, 
"  how  often  that  car  has  come  round  in  the  eighteen  centuries 
of  our  exile?  We  have  missed  it  every  time."  We  have  missed 
it  again  this  time,  and  who  knows  if  it  can  ever  come  round 
again? 

President  Wilson  told  the  Peace  Conference:  "  We  are  here 
to  see  that  every  people  in  the  world  shall  choose  its  own  masters, 
and  guide  its  own  destinies,  not  as  we  wish,  but  as  it  wishes." 

100 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Who  can  see  in  this  new  Palestine  Jewry,  ground  between  Arab 
and  Briton,  any  real  self-determination  of  destiny?  Where  in 
this  new-fangled  hypocrisy  of  "  Mandates,"  which  imposes 
France  upon  an  "  independent "  Syria,  kicking  against  the 
pricks,  and  which  in  Palestine  dictates  to  Jew  and  Arab  alike, 
is  there  room  for  peoples  going  their  Wilsonian  way,  "  unhin- 
dered, unthreatened,  unafraid  "  ? 

There  does  not  seem  to  be  any  time-limit  in  the  "  Mandate," 
any  stipulation  for  withdrawal.  This  is  one  of  the  several 
reasons  for  which  I  could  wish  America  had  taken  a  mandate 
for  Armenia.  Her  honest  withdrawal  as  soon  as  she  had  put 
Armenia  upon  its  feet  would  have  been  a  precedent  that  France 
and  England  could  scarcely  have  disregarded.  It  was  honest, 
however,  of  Sir  Herbert  Samuel,  in  entering  Palestine,  not  to 
mention  "  The  League  of  Nations,"  but  to  say  he  came  to  rule 
in  the  name  of  the  King,  and  it  was  for  the  King  that  prayers 
were  said  in  the  synagogues.  It  had  already  been  manifest  from 
Lord  Curzon's  speech  in  the  House  of  Lords  that  none  except 
negative  measures  were  to  be  taken  to  evolve  a  "  Jewish  National 
Home."  But  one  must  be  grateful  for  the  frankness  with  which 
Lord  Curzon  admitted  that  the  factors  which  determined 
British  policy  were  the  military  value  of  Palestine  and  the  eco- 
nomic value  of  the  Jews,  apart  from  whom  none  of  the  existing 
inhabitants  could  regenerate  Palestine.  Equally  candid  was 
his  explanation  of  the  status  of  these  regenerators  —  not  occu- 
pants of  a  "  National  Home  "  but,  as  Punch  summed  it  up, 
"  paying  guests."  Lord  Sydenham  struck  a  more  Pharisaical 
note  when  he  gave  as  one  of  the  aims  of  the  British  invasion  of 
Palestine  the  desire  "  to  rescue  the  people  from  centuries  of 
oppression  by  the  Turks,"  while  the  rights  of  the  Jews  rested 
only  upon  a  "particularly  ruthless  conquest."  (With  this 
myth  of  the  ruthless  conquest  of  Canaan  I  deal  in  the  essay, 
"  The  Legend  of  the  Conquering  Jew."  )  Curiously  ignoring 
the  rights  that  rested  on  Mr.  Balfour's  promise,  he  went  on  to 
complain  that  "  a  self-constituted  Zionist  Commission  settled 
down  in  Jerusalem  under  the  shadow  of  our  military  protection 
and  quite  close  to  our  barracks  and  began  at  once  to  interfere 
with  the  administration."  And  forsooth  the  Zionists  are 
demanding  a  monopoly  of  public  works,  and  trying  to  substitute 
Hebrew  for  Arabic !  How  otherwise  "  a  Jewish  National 
Home  "  is  to  be  built  up,  Lord  Sydenham  leaves  unexplained. 
Lord  Lamington,  another  partaker  in  the  Debate,  though  at  the 
time  of  the  Balfour  Declaration  he  had  appeared  on  the  Zionist 

101 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

platform  in  its  support,  has  now  discovered  how  intricate  the 
problem  really  was,  and  that  "  under  the  stress  of  war  we 
entered  into  various  undertakings  which  undoubtedly  clashed 
with  one  another."  I  cordially  agree  with  his  criticism  of  the 
ambiguity  of  Mr.  Balfour's  Declaration  and  that  if  it  did  not 
mean  the  whole  country  was  going  to  be  under  Jewish  control, 
it  meant  nothing.  Lord  Sheffield's  tirade  against  the  scheme 
(like  John  Bull's  or  the  Spectator's  or  Frederic  Harrison's  in 
the  Fortnightly  Review)  would  have  carried  more  weight  if  made 
in  "  the  stress  of  war  "  and  before  the  political  profit  of  the 
scheme  had  been  reaped.  Its  critics  conveniently  forget  how  it 
stimulated  American  sympathy  and  how  the  Austrian  and 
German  Jews  welcomed  it  recklessly  even  at  the  height  of  Hin- 
denburg's  success.  But  the  most  ominous  figure  in  the  Debate 
was  the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury,  who  despite  his  appeal  after 
the  Lambeth  Conference  for  "  a  rally  of  all  spiritual  forces," 
even  those  outside  the  Church,  here  threw  away  the  opportu- 
nity of  showing  that  Christianity  had  survived  the  war,  nay, 
was  content  to  see  his  country's  pledge  reduced  to  "  a  scrap  of 
paper."  Strange  that  the  Church  must  always  be  in  the 
wrong.  Pope  or  Primate,  it  matters  not,  there  is  always  this 
fatal  gravitation  to  the  lower  course. 

One  imagines  that  an  obscure  antagonism  to  Judaism  ani- 
mates the  archiepiscopal  bosom,  possibly  even  a  subconscious 
British  Imperialism.  The  Pope's  backsliding  is  the  more 
regrettable  since  before  the  armistice  His  Holiness  spoke  com- 
fortably to  Mr.  Sokolow,  and  strove  impartially,  and  not  as  a 
pro-German  intriguer,  to  end  the  world-agony.  But  he,  or  his 
Jesuit  forces,  seem  to  have  discovered  that  if  the  plot  for  the 
political  revival  of  the  Vatican  in  France  is  to  prosper,  the 
Pope  must  give  up  blessing  the  sequestration  of  Syrian  territory 
to  Jewry  or  to  England.  As  a  British  publicist  bluntly  put  it: 
"  If  ever  Syria  is  to  come  under  effective  French  control  (and 
upon  the  control  of  Syria  depends  the  possibility  of  transport- 
ing Mesopotamian  oil)  it  will  be  because  Beirut  has  long  been  a 
centre  of  French  Catholic  influence." 

Cardinal  Bourne  is  not  satisfied  that  the  Jews  shall  be  done 
out  of  their  political  rights  only.  Speaking  at  the  National 
Catholic  Congress  at  Liverpool,  he  urged  that  "  even  if  a  direct 
political  control  were  definitely  excluded  by  the  British  admin- 
istration, there  was  every  danger  of  the  establishment  of  a 
Zionist  economic  and  financial  domination  which  would  be  no 
less  unacceptable  in  its  results."     It  is  to  be  feared  that  the 

102 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Catholic  elements  in  our  own  Foreign  Office  cannot  be  ignored  in 
estimating  the  forces  at  work  to  override  the  Balfour  Declara- 
tion. 

In  this  tug  of  war  between  the  Christian  Powers,  with  the 
Arab  pulling  in  a  third  direction,  there  is  obviously  scant  chance 
of  a  real  Jewish  Palestine.  To  produce  that  out  of  the  con- 
flicting ingredients  is  a  task  not  for  a  statesman  but  a  conjurer. 
Sir  Herbert  Samuel  has  no  such  thaumaturgic  talent;  he  is  a 
conscientious  British  official  whom  even  his  love  for  his  people 
and  the  gracious  Zionist  romance  in  his  own  family  cannot 
bias.  The  interest  of  England  in  getting  her  new  possession 
developed  by  Jewish  capital  and  industry  is  outweighed  if  the 
Arabs  are  antagonised  too  deeply,  and  since  moreover  the  Jews 
are  the  Uriah  Heeps  and  not  the  Oliver  Twists  of  politics, 
England  may  safely  ride  roughshod  over  them.  In  placing  all 
their  hopes  on  a  peaceful  penetration,  and  in  pretending  that 
the  Arabs  can  be  safely  submerged,  the  Zionists  have  presumed 
to  know  better  than  Jehovah,  who  protested :  "  But  if  ye  will 
not  drive  out  the  inhabitants  of  the  land  from  before  you ;  then 
it  shall  come  to  pass,  that  those  which  ye  let  remain  of  them 
shall  be  pricks  in  your  eyes,  and  thorns  in  your  sides,  and  shall 
vex  you  in  the  land  wherein  ye  dwell."  Is  such  a  home  worth 
having? 

XXIII 

I  did  not  need  to  wait  for  Lord  Curzon's  speech  or  Sir 
Herbert  Samuel's  British-born  ukases  in  Palestine  to  see  that 
Zionism  was  to  be  betrayed.  In  February,  1919,  I  took 
advantage  of  the  courteous  invitation  of  the  League  of  Nations 
Journal  to  expound  my  foreboding.  And  in  an  article  entitled 
"  Zionism  and  the  League  of  Nations  "  I  said : 

"  Since  England,  France,  Italy,  Japan  and  President  Wilson  — 
those  five  Great  Powers  —  have  all  approved  the  establishment  in 
Palestine  of  a  '  Jewish  National  Home,'  it  follows  there  must  still 
be  a  Jewish  Nation,  even  though  devoid  of  the  territorial  concentra- 
tion which  anciently  produced  it.  Yet,  at  the  Peace  Conference,  the 
great  people  whose  prophets  more  than  twenty-five  centuries  ago 
preached  the  League  of  Nations,  is  denied  the  voice  in  the  shaping 
thereof  which,  through  the  Emir  Feisal,  is  accorded  to  its  Arab 
neighbours  in  Palestine,  and  which  is  not  refused  even  to  the  black 
republics  of  Haiti  and  Liberia.  This  contempt  for  the  Jew  —  like 
the  continuation  of  '  secret  diplomacy  '  at  the  very  Conference  de- 
signed to  end  it  —  is  characteristic  of  humanity's  tragic  immaturity, 

103 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

its  inability  to  see  the  better  life  steadily  and  to  see  it  whole.  But 
it  must  be  admitted  that  Zionism  has  invited  humiliation  by  its 
pathetic  prostration  to  pick  up  the  crumbs  thrown  it,  and  by  the 
cheers  which  rose  from  every  Ghetto  and  Judengasse,  Allied  or  en- 
emy, to  greet  that  diplomatic  British  declaration  which  Mr.  Barnes, 
a  member  of  the  War  Cabinet  responsible  for  it  —  now  that  vic- 
tory is  attained  and  the  profitable  imponderabilia  of  the  Balfour 
proclamation  have  been  harvested  —  declares  to  have  meant  no  more 
than  that  the  Jews  of  Palestine  should  have  the  same  civil  and  re- 
ligious rights  as  all  the  other  inhabitants  of  Palestine.  (As  if  that 
elemental  axiom  needed  a  world-trumpeted  proclamation!)  It  is 
not  in  fact  to  be  Palestine  for  the  Jews  but  the  Jews  for  Palestine, 
or  rather  for  the  British  Empire. 

"  It  is  true  that  years  before  Mr.  Balfour's  Declaration  I  had 
myself  pressed  —  like  the  Manchester  Guardian  —  for  a  British 
Judaja  on  a  do  ut  des  basis,  the  Jews  to  build  up  Palestine  as  a 
Jewish  State  on  the  political  model  of  Canada  or  New  Zealand,  thus 
constituting  a  buffer  State  for  the  defence  of  Egypt.  Such  a  mu- 
tual service  creates  a  more  solid  basis  for  a  Jewish  State  than  Chris- 
tian sympathy.  But  to  ask  the  Jews,  in  return  for  occupying  this 
dangerous  position,  to  accept  only  the  status  they  could  acquire  with 
infinitely  less  pains  in  the  United  States,  to  exploit  their  passion 
for  Palestine,  seems  to  me  singularly  lacking  in  magnanimity.  In 
the  original  secret  treaty  dividing  Palestine  with  France  and  Rus- 
sia, the  Jews  were  not  considered  at  all,  and  they  were  not  the  gov- 
erning consideration  even  in  the  substituted  scheme,  for  its  primary 
object  (as  Colonel  Amery  of  the  War  Cabinet  Staff  has  admitted  at 
a  Zionist  banquet)  was  the  defence  of  Egypt.  Nor  was  its  militar- 
istic and  imperialistic  character  altered  by  the  disinterested  sym- 
pathy with  the  Jewish  problem  which  many  great  Englishmen  have 
shown,  and  in  which  Mr.  Balfour  himself  is  not  lacking.  But  that 
statesman  should  have  addressed  his  Declaration,  not  to  the  Zionists, 
who  are  an  international  body,  but  to  the  constituents  of  the  League 
of  British  Jews,  whose  Chauvinism  would  have  co-operated  with 
their  hatred  of  Zionism  to  render  them  ideal  political  agents  for  a 
scheme  as  advantageous  to  England  as  it  is  corrosive  to  Zionism 
proper. 

"  If,  however,  the  Peace  Conference  turns  out  to  be  more  than  a 
high  comedy  and  a  genuine  League  of  Nations  emerges  from  it, 
then  President  Wilson  will  have  made  Mr.  Barnes'  standpoint  as 
obsolete  as  my  own.  Under  the  League  of  Nations,  with  its  substi- 
tution of  reason  and  goodwill  for  the  rivalries  of  force,  Egypt  would 
need  no  defence,  nor  the  Jews  any  protector,  guardian  or  super- 
visor, other  than  the  permanent  Executive  of  the  League,  with  its 
sword  of  Damocles  ready  to  fall  on  any  offender.  The  appoint- 
ment of  a  Trustee  Power,  whether  Britain,  France  or  America, 
would  become  superfluous.     Israel  could  at  once  set  up  all  the  ma- 

104 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

chinery  of  Government,  and  from  his  rich  human  resources  in  every 
country  could  provide  himself  with  a  better  administration  than  that 
likely  to  be  supplied  by  any  Trustee  Power.  The  supposition  that 
he  would  deal  less  reverentially  with  the  Holy  Places  than  the  Turk 
is  an  insult.  These  shrines  are,  moreover,  at  bottom,  Jewish.  As 
for  internal  order,  Israel  has  a  soldiery  of  three-quarters  of  a  mil- 
lion to  draw  from,  starred  with  military  honours  at  the  hands  of 
every  belligerent  country.  For  of  course  even  ex-enemy  Jews  must 
help  to  re-build  Palestine,  which  would  thus  become  a  microcosm  of 
the  new  world-order. 

"  The  claim  of  the  Jews  to  Palestine  does  not  rest  merely  on  his- 
tory, but  on  the  fact  that  while  they  are  the  only  people  on  earth 
absolutely  without  a  national  home,  Palestine  is  a  derelict  country, 
whose  redemption  needs  such  vast  financial  and  labour  forces  that 
it  can  only  '  pay  '  a  people  with  ideal  interests  in  the  soil.  Its 
600,000  Arabs,  whose  disproportionate  presence  is  the  gravest  ob- 
stacle to  the  rise  of  the  Jewish  State,  have  created  nothing  there  ex- 
cept trouble  for  the  Jewish  Colonies,  and  should  be  gradually  and 
amicably  transplanted  to  the  Arab  Kingdom,  which  is  to  be  re-es- 
tablished next  door,  and  with  which  the  Jewish  State  would  cor- 
dially co-operate.  Race  redistribution  in  the  interests  of  the  gen- 
eral world-happiness  is,  I  take  it,  one  of  the  functions  of  the  League 
of  Nations,  and  one  that  must  be  executed  in  many  parts  of  Europe. 
It  has  even  been  suggested  as  the  solution  of  the  Irish  question. 
But  I  had  rather  see  an  independent  Palestine  consisting  of  Arabs 
and  Jews  shouldering  a  common  burden,  than  see  a  Palestine  Jewry 
paralysed  by  tutelage  and  robbed  by  a  Trustee  Power  of  the  invig- 
orating struggle  for  self-expression  and  self-determination." 

XXIV 

It  will  be  seen  that  I  more  than  suspected  the  Versailles 
Peace  Conference  would  prove  a  "  high  comedy,"  but  in  view  of 
the  world-interests  at  stake  I  felt  it  should  be  given  —  as  I  had 
at  first  given  the  Balfour  Declaration  —  the  benefit  of  the 
doubt,  and  therefore  when  I  was  asked  by  Asia,  the  journal  of 
the  American  Asiatic  Society,  to  contribute  to  its  special 
Palestine  number,  I  wrote,  in  an  article  entitled  "  Before  the 
Peace  Conference  "  : 

"  With  the  arrival  in  France  of  President  Wilson,  the  champion  of 
the  League  of  Nations,  the  most  momentous  episode  in  all  human 
history  begins,  the  true  '  War  for  the  World,'  to  which  Armageddon 
has  been  only  a  prologue,  and  the  loss  of  which  would  mean  the  vic- 
tory of  Prussianism  and  the  bankruptcy  of  civilisation.  The  whole 
planet  is  in  the  grip  of  Allied  Might,  and  it  needs  but  Allied  Right 

105 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

to  reshape  all  racial  boundaries  and  international  relations.  Here 
there  is  no  place  for  Secret  Diplomacy.  All  claims  and  interests 
must  be  plain,  provable  and  public,  and  it  is  in  the  light  of  the  con- 
tent nunt  of  peoples  and  not  in  the  darkness  of  diplomatic  intrigue 
that  the  repartition  must  be  made.  In  some  instances,  where  the 
chaos  of  populations  is  a  menace  to  permanent  settlement,  there 
must  be  mutual  adjustments,  even  (in  the  gravest  cases)  gradual 
measures  of  race  redistribution,  but,  given  the  will  to  Peace,  there  is 
no  knot  which  Reason  and  Love  cannot  untie.  If  mankind  thus 
builds  a  brotherhood,  the  immeasurable  slaughter  and  suffering  of 
the  war  will  be  redeemed,  and  the  prophetic  gospel  of  ancient  Ju- 
deea  will  come  to  its  own  at  last:  '  They  shall  beat  their  swords 
into  ploughshares  and  their  spears  into  pruning-hooks.  Nation 
shall  not  lift  up  sword  against  nation;  neither  shall  they  learn  war 
any  more.' 

"  But  Judaism  stands  to  gain  also  a  minor  traditional  hope  from 
the  Peace  Conference:  the  re-possession  of  Palestine.  And  if  this 
secondary  consummation  could  be  united  with  the  setting  up  of 
Jerusalem  as  the  seat  of  the  League  of  Nations  instead  of  the  bank- 
rupt Hague,  the  two  Hebraic  dreams,  the  major  and  the  minor, 
would  be  fused  in  one,  and  the  Hebrew  metropolis  —  that  meeting- 
place  of  three  world-religions  —  would  become  at  once  the  centre 
and  symbol  of  the  new  era. 

"  But  a  Hebrew  Palestine,  if  it  is  to  exist  at  all,  must  be  a  reality, 
not  a  sham.  Such  interpretations  as  have  hitherto  been  vouch- 
safed us  of  the  vaunted  British  Declaration  scarcely  seem  serious. 
The  '  Jewish  National  Home  '  is  to  be  a  British  Crown  Colony  with 
a  predominantly  Arab  population,  even  if  a  French  Syria  does  not 
lop  off  a  considerable  slice  from  its  meagre  10,000  square  miles. 
The  power  in  every  country,  Lord  Morley  tells  us  in  his  '  Auto- 
biography,' always  resifles  in  the  land-owning  classes.  Yet  over 
30,000  Arab  landlords  and  some  600,000  fellahin  are  to  continue 
in  possession  of  the  bulk  of  the  Holy  soil.  Moreover,  Bethlehem 
and  perhaps  other  places  are  to  be  too  sacred  for  Jewish  hands. 
Nor  may  we  guard  the  shrines  entrusted  for  so  many  centuries  to 
the  Turk,  although  there  is  no  monument  in  Palestine,  whether 
Christian,  Jewish  or  Mohammedan,  which  is  not  a  memorial  to 
Jewish  genius  and  saintliness.  While  the  Czecho-Slovaks  and  the 
Jugo-Slavs  and  still  other  peoples  scarcely  known  to  history  are  to 
flourish  on  their  own  soil  with  all  the  apparatus  of  sovereignty,  the 
greatest  and  longest-martyred  of  all  the  oppressed  peoples  —  a 
people  which  has  supplied  no  small  proportion  of  the  outstanding 
figures  of  the  world-crisis,  and  in  whose  literature  this  whole  new 
era  finds  its  inspiration  —  is  to  crawl  into  a  corner  of  its  own  land 
like  a  leper  colony,  warned  to  keep  off  this  and  to  keep  off  that,  or 
to  keep  away  from  this  Jew  and  to  keep  away  from  that  Jew,  and 
repeating  on  its  own  soil  the  humiliations  and  subservience  of  its 

106 


THE  VOICE  OF  JEKUSALEM 

2,000  years  of  agony  and  ignominy.  Such  a  Palestine  has  neither 
the  glamour  of  poetry  nor  the  practicality  of  prose.  It  is  neither 
Jewish  nor  National  nor  a  Home. 

"  If  this  is  what  the  great  Declaration  meant,  then  it  was  an  illu- 
sion and  an  insult.  But  we  are  entitled  to  assume,  and  the  elo- 
quence of  its  Christian  protagonists  and  their  endorsement  of  the 
Hebrew  University  encourage  us  to  assume,  that  the  Declaration 
was  neither  a  political  manoeuvre  nor  a  mockery  of  the  great  Jewish 
hope;  that  it  was  intended  to  settle  the  great  Jewish  question  in  har- 
mony with  the  spirit  of  this  great  moment  of  world  reconstruction, 
when  everything  is  in  the  melting-pot  and  the  whole  '  sorry  scheme 
of  things  '  that  has  been  shattered  is  to  be  remoulded  '  nearer  to 
the  heart's  desire.'  And  hence  we  must  suppose  that  this  new  sys- 
tem of  creative  politics  will  not  stop  short  with  disentangling  Eu- 
rope, and  that  those  amicable  measures  of  race  redistribution,  which 
we  have  already  seen  to  be  an  unavoidable  part  of  a  final  world-set- 
tlement, will  be  carried  out  in  Palestine  as  elsewhere.  Thus  the 
Arabs  would  gradually  be  settled  in  the  new  and  vast  Arabian 
Kingdom  to  liberate  which  from  the  Turk,  Jews  no  less  than  Arabs 
have  laid  down  their  lives,  and  with  which  the  Jewish  Common- 
wealth would  cultivate  the  closest  friendship  and  co-operation. 
Only  thus  can  Palestine  become  a  '  Jewish  National  Home.'  Only 
thus  can  Israel — with  his  diaspora  of  fourteen  millions  —  risk  be- 
ing told  that  Palestine  is  his  country.  Only  thus  can  a  final  peace- 
ful refuge  be  prepared  against  such  race  hatreds  as  are  finding 
bloody  expression  in  Poland  at  this  very  moment.  Only  with  a 
Jewish  majority  (not,  of  course,  a  Jewish  totality),  only  with  the 
land  nationalised  —  and  Jewish  as  well  as  Arab  land  must  be  ex- 
propriated with  reasonable  compensation  —  can  Israel  enter  upon 
the  task  of  building  up  that  model  State,  the  construction  of  which 
American  Zionism,  in  its  trustful  acceptance  of  the  Declaration,  has 
already  outlined.     And  it  is  now  or  never. 

"  Even  if  our  object  was  merely  to  build  up  an  ordinary  common- 
wealth, had  we,  in  addition  to  the  chaos  of  the  regathering,  to  con- 
front inter-racial  friction  and  unrest,  which  indeed  has  already  be- 
gun, our  statesmanship  would  be  taxed  to  breaking-point.  If  Pales- 
tine is  to  be  '  safe  for  democracy,'  a  minority  cannot  at  the  outset 
control  a  majority  six  times  its  size,  while  if  on  the  other  hand  the 
maj  ority  controls  the  minority,  it  could  restrict  our  immigration  and 
nip  the  '  Jewish  National  Home '  in  the  bud.  In  any  case,  the 
cheap  vast  labour-force  already  in  existence  would  seriously  limit  the 
possibilities  of  Jewish  immigration.  If  we  boycotted  this  force  we 
should  be  accused  of  worse  than  Polish  racialism;  if  we  used  it  we 
should  be  charged  with  exploiting  it,  with  being  merely  a  capitalistic 
class,  parasites  on  our  '  hewers  of  wood  and  drawers  of  water.' 
With  three-quarters  of  a  million  soldiers  in  the  great  war,  not  to 
mention  the  Jewish  regiments  already  in  Palestine,  on  which,  ac- 

107 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

cording  to  Colonel  Patterson,  the  whole  military  movement  was  piv- 
oted, we  have  ample  resources  both  for  labour  and  order,  and  with 
a  general  of  genius  like  Sir  John  Monash  there  is  no  need  to  search 
for  a  Jewish  Governor.  If  this  is  a  dream,  it  at  least  follows  the 
laws  of  life  and  politics  on  which  all  other  States  are  established: 
it  is  the  timid  compromise  that  would  be  the  doubtful  and  the  dan- 
gerous experiment.  One  would  have  thought  that  this  war  was  a 
sufficient  object-lesson  in  the  rankling  poisons  of  race-hatred  gener- 
ated between  peoples  pent  in  the  same  territory.  No,  the  Jews 
must  possess  Palestine  as  the  Arabs  are  to  possess  Arabia  or  the 
Poles  Poland.  Otherwise,  while  not  abandoning  the  existing  He- 
brew Colonies  nor  neglecting  Palestine  as  an  immigration  area, 
Israel  must  look,  like  Jochanan  ben  Zakkai,  for  other  means  of 
continuing  his  chosen  mission." 


XXV 

We  are  thus  back  at  our  starting-point  —  Jochanan  ben 
Zakkai  and  the  fall  of  the  Jewish  State.  Nothing  is  settled  and 
Israel  is  still  confronted  with  the  riddle  of  the  Sphinx. 

Undoubtedly,  my  suggestion  of  amicable  race-redistribution 
or  a  voluntary  trek  like  that  of  the  Boers  from  Cape  Colony  is 
literally  the  only  "  way  out  "  of  the  difficulty  of  creating  a 
Jewish  State  in  Palestine,  and  if  it  is  as  impracticable  as  is 
generally  alleged,  then  the  whole  Zionist  project  was  a  chimera, 
an  impasse  into  which  Britain  was  misled  by  the  Zionist  leaders 
at  a  time  when  British  politicians  caught  at  any  straw,  and,  as 
Lord  Lamington  said,  entered  under  stress  of  war  into  under- 
takings that  clashed  with  one  another.  Two  national  homes, 
in  a  country  smaller  than  ranches  have  been  in  South  America, 
constitute  a  greater  impracticability  than  an  Arab  exodus. 
Nor  is  my  suggestion  such  an  enormity  as  Prince  Fcisal  pre- 
tends. Analogous  shiftings  of  population  have  been  suggested 
in  other  cases,  not  only  in  Ireland  but  wherever  the  peace 
treaties  have  left  "  Ulsters  " —  rankling  matter  in  the  wrong 
place,  that  had  best  be  drawn  off.  The  Poles,  as  I  have  pointed 
out,  are  claiming  that  the  whole  three  millions  of  their  Jewry 
should  be  emigrated  because  their  nationality  cannot  endure  an 
adulteration  of  one  in  seven.  How  then  shall  the  Jewish 
nationality  in  Palestine  grapple  with  an  Arab  nationality  of 
seven  to  one?  I  should  have  no  objection  to  an  orderly  migra- 
tion of  Polish  Jews  from  the  inferno  which  Poland  is  making  for 
them,  to  a  less  barbarous  soil,  though  while  Arab  States  await 
the  Palestine  Arabs  on  the  very  borders  of  the  Holy  Land, 

108 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

there  is  nowhere,  far  or  near,  any  Jewish  State  to  receive  the 
Polish  Jews,  and  they  must  at  best  be  distributed  about  America 
or  Russia.  But  do  not  let  us  over-sentimentalise,  or  talk  as  if 
nobody  ever  wandered  from  the  beloved  groves  or  graves  of  their 
forefathers,  as  if  man  was  a  limpet.  The  exodus  of  villagers  to 
towns  is  a  phenomenon  only  too  frequent.  The  colossal  streams 
of  pre-war  emigration  from  Europe  —  a  million  a  year  to 
America  alone  —  are  a  proof  that  not  even  new  conditions 
daunt  the  peasant  mind.  In  the  war  we  have  seen  millions, 
especially  of  Jews,  calamitously  uprooted  and  wandering  about 
Europe  footsore,  hungry,  and  bleeding,  everywhere  expelled  and 
nowhere  welcomed.  By  the  terms  of  the  armistice  all  Germans 
in  Turkey  were  compelled  to  emigrate  at  brief  notice.  Com- 
pared with  such  dolorous  hegiras,  a  well-ordered  emigration  to 
a  pre-arranged  home  amid  one's  kinsmen,  with  full  compensation 
for  values  left  behind,  a  movement  organised  at  either  end, 
offers  no  terrors  compared  with  the  conflicts  and  race-frictions 
it  averts.  The  Arabs  of  Palestine  might  of  themselves  desire  to 
withdraw  from  the  impending  pressure  of  Anglo-Jewish  civilisa- 
tion, as  the  more  fanatical  Mohammedans  are  now  beginning 
to  trek  from  India  to  Afghanistan  in  connection  with  the 
Caliphate  agitation.  According  to  an  Arab  sheikh  who  has 
issued  a  pro-Zionist  manifesto,  the  Arabs  of  Palestine  are  used 
to  being  expropriated.  It  has  been  the  practice  —  and  without 
compensation  even  —  of  the  very  Effendis  who  are  behind  the 
opposition  to  Zionism.  And  there  is  a  further  consideration. 
The  Palestine  which  will  be  "  The  Jewish  National  Home  " 
will  not  be  the  Palestine  now  overrun  by  the  Arabs,  any  more 
than  the  Dutch  polder-land  is  the  domain  of  those  who  fished 
and  shot  over  it  before  it  was  reclaimed  from  the  sea.  The 
whole  country,  to  whose  ruin  Arab  fecklessness  has  contributed 
as  much  as  Turkish  tyranny,  will  have  to  be  re-created.  Much 
of  the  land  is  stony  or  malarious :  much  is  not  beneficially  occu- 
pied; freed  from  its  cultivation  by  the  primitive  ploughs  and 
methods  of  the  illiterate  fell  ohm,  it  could  raise  far  more  food 
for  a  hungering  humanity.  Thousands  of  the  proprietors  are 
absentee  landlords,  resident  in  Cairo  or  elsewhere,  who  would 
merely  profiteer  by  the  rise  in  land  values  due  to  Jewish  indus- 
try. And  if  Lord  Shaftesbury  was  literally  inexact  in  describ- 
ing Palestine  as  a  country  without  a  people,  he  was  essentially 
correct,  for  there  is  no  Arab  people  living  in  intimate  fusion 
with  the  country,  utilising  its  resources  and  stamping  it  with  a 
characteristic  impress :  there  is  at  best  an  Arab  encampment, 

109 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

the  break-up  of  which  would  throw  upon  the  Jews  the  actual 
manual  labour  of  regeneration,  and  prevent  them  from  ex- 
ploiting the  fdlahin,  whose  numbers  and  lower  wages  are  more- 
over a  considerable  obstacle  to  the  proposed  immigration  from 
Poland  and  other  suffering  Jewish  centres. 

If,  however,  the  Arabs  will  not,  as  Longfellow  taught  us  to 
expect,  fold  their  tents  and  silently  steal  away,  if  they  elect  to 
remain  in  Palestine,  then,  as  I  have  emphasised  in  my  speeches, 
"  their  welfare  must  be  as  dear  to  us  as  our  own."  But  even  so, 
painful  though  the  necessity  be,  they  should  come  at  once  under 
a  Jewish  Government,  and  Sir  Herbert  Samuel  should  represent 
the  Zionists  rather  than  the  British  Foreign  Office ;  the  small 
but  expansible  Jewish  force  being  backed  up  by  Britain  or  the 
Allies,  exactly  as  Poland  or  Czecho-Slovakia  has  been  backed 
up.  For,  as  I  pointed  out  in  reply  to  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison's 
querulous  crudities  in  The  Fortnightly  Review: 

"  the  Arabs  should  recognise  that  the  road  of  their  renewed  national 
glory  lies  through  Baghdad,  Damascus,  and  Mecca,  and  all  the  vast 
territory  freed  for  them  from  the  Turks,  and  be  content  so  far  as 
Palestine  is  concerned  to  be  politically  submerged.  The  Powers 
which  freed  it  and  them  have  surely  the  right  to  ask  them  not  to 
grudge  the  petty  strip  necessary  for  the  renaissance  of  a  still  more 
down-trodden  people." 

The  unearned  increment  of  land  values  which  would  at  once 
accrue  to  the  landlords,  the  rise  in  wages  which  would  come  to 
the  fellah  in,  and  the  sanitation,  drainage,  irrigation  and  af- 
forestation brought  to  the  common  country  would  be  sufficient 
compensation  for  their  political  subordination.  The  San 
Ptemo  Treaty  provided  that  nothing  should  be  done  to  lower 
their  status.  But  that  status  had  been  one  of  subjection  to 
Turkey,  and  they  would  assuredly  find  more  liberal  governors 
in  the  Jews.  The  last  Zionist  Conference  voted  for  land-na- 
tionalisation, but  how  can  the  Zionists  nationalise  the  Arab 
land  unless  they  are  the  Government,  how  indeed  can  they  work 
out  any  national  ideal?  Palestine  will  not  even  have  a  Jewish 
calendar! 

XXVI 

The  reader  will  ask,  however,  since  the  Arab  will  neither  sub- 
mit to  the  Jewish  government  nor  trek;  since,  rather,  under  the 
Pan-Arabic  leaders  a  new  immigration  of  Arabs  is  threatened, 

110 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

how  could  Britain  handle  the  problem  more  fairly  than  she  has 
done?     The  answer  is  that  in  the  first  place  she  should  never 
have  announced  a  solution  which  is  no  solution,  and  whose  profit 
is  only  to  her.     Summoned  to  explain  how  he  proposes  to  build 
up  the  "Jewish  National  Home,"  Mr.  Balfour  can  do  noth- 
ing but  appeal  at  the  Albert  Hall  to  the  Arabs  of  Palestine, 
and  in  the  very  language  which  I  had  used  a  week  or  so  earlier 
in  replying  to  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison.     "  Remember  we  have 
freed  you  from  the  Turk,  that  we  are  setting  up  Arab  States  in 
the  Hedjaz  and  Mesopotamia,"  echoes  Mr.  Balfour.     "  Do  not 
begrudge  that  small  notch  in  the  Arab  territory  being  given  to 
the  people  which  for  hundreds  of  years  has  been  separated  from 
it."     But  a  plea  to  the  Arabs,  which  is  all  very  well  from  a 
humble  penman  with  no  power  but  words,  becomes  ridiculous 
in  the  statesman  responsible  for  the  project,  in  the  depositary 
of  the  Allied  Power,  which  in  return  for  services,  without  which 
neither  Syria  nor  Palestine  could  have  been  wrested  from  the 
Turk,  undertook  to  shape  both  the  Arab  and  the  Jewish  future. 
Mr.  Balfour  should  have  made  the  necessary  provision  for  the 
rise  of  a  Jewish  State  when  he  dealt  with  Feisal  and  the  Arab 
leaders :  their  consent  to  the  sequestration  of  this  "  small  notch 
in  the  Arab  territory  "  should  have  been  stipulated  in  advance, 
at  the  moment  when  they  were  plunging  their  fists  into  bags  of 
British  gold;  a  moment  immortalised  for  us  by  that  invaluable, 
if  sometimes  indiscreet,  institution,  the  cinema. 

Without  any  provision  whether  for  Arab  emigration  or 
Jewish  administration,  Palestine  bids  fair  to  remain  purely  a 
British  possession,  whose  reconstruction  is  thrown  upon  Jewish 
capital  and  energy.  Max  Nordau  —  whose  withdrawal  from 
Zionist  officialdom  is  significant  —  has  shown  in  a  brilliant  anal- 
ysis the  danger  to  the  Suez  Canal,  India,  and  all  England's 
interests  in  the  near-East  if  the  new  Arabo-Syrian  imperialism 
goes  unchecked.  The  Jews,  according  to  this  conception,  are 
to  occupy  the  dangerous  position  of  a  wedge  between  Syrian 
and  Egyptian  discontent,  "  to  defend  the  British  position  at 
the  point  of  contact  of  Africa  and  Asia,"  to  stand,  in  Mr. 
Wells's  metaphor,  amid  the  swirl  of  traffic  on  that  old  and 
hazardous  highway  where  they  were  always  being  run  over. 
But  this  time  without  the  compensation  of  constituting  a  State, 
and,  unless  definite  political  guarantees  are  given,  without  any 
hope  even  for  the  future ;  mere  pawns  in  an  imperial  game. 

"  Sic  vos  non  vobis  mellificatis  apes." 
Ill 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

And,  as  Dr.  Nordau  points  out  too,  what  alternative  policy 
had  England?  She  could  not  leave  Palestine  to  France,  or 
give  it  back  to  Turkey.  It  is  providential  for  her  that  the 
Jews  are  at  hand  to  relieve  her  of  the  burden.  I  well  remem- 
ber how  Mr.  Barnes,  who  is  now  so  suspiciously  concerned  to 
whittle  away  the  Balfour  Declaration,  confided  to  a  Chris- 
tian friend  of  mine  the  embarrassment  of  the  Government  at 
the  opposition  of  the  wealthy  anti-Zionist  Jews.  "  We  don't 
know  what  to  do  about  Palestine  —  the  Jews  won't  take  it." 

Even  the  Zionist  Jews  who  do  not  nominally  refuse  Palestine 
believe  that  a  minority  must  in  no  circumstances  govern  a  ma- 
jority. Placed  between  two  mad  peoples,  the  English  and  the 
Jews,  the  Jews  who  will  never  take  a  country,  and  the  English 
who  will  never  leave  one  untaken,  I  behold  the  long  effort  to 
endow  a  landless  people  with  a  country  ending  in  the  addition 
of  one  to  an  Empire  already  possessing  a  quarter  of  the  globe. 
Nordau,  who  shares  the  view  that  a  minority  must  not  govern 
a  majority,  finds  the  solution  not  in  a  vast  Arab  emigration 
but  in  a  vast  Jewish  immigration,  say  half  a  million  in  a  single 
year;  a  proposition  in  whose  practicability  he  is  the  sole  be- 
liever, just  as  I  stand  alone  in  the  wild  contention  that  there 
are  occasions  when  a  minority  has  a  right  to  govern  a  major- 
ity: a  phenomenon  apparently  unknown  even  in  India  or  South 
Africa!  My  defence  of  this  extraordinary  thesis  must  be 
briefly  summarised  from  the  many  speeches  which  I  spare  the 
reader. 

(1)  Small  as  is  the  Jewish  population,  the  British  governing 
minority  in  Palestine  is  very  much  smaller. 

(2)  The  smallness  of  the  Jewish  population,  like  the  relative 
largeness  of  the  Arab  population,  is  transient.  The  very  ob- 
ject of  the  scheme  is  to  find  a  place  for  millions.  Had  the 
Jews  not  been  a  minority  in  Palestine,  there  would  have  been 
no  need  of  special  Balfourian  manifestoes  on  their  behalf;  even 
under  the  Turkish  constitution  they  would  have  dominated 
automatically.  This  is  a  scheme,  as  Lord  Robert  Cecil  put  it, 
"  dealing  in  futures  " ;  what  we  have  to  look  at  is  not  the  few 
myriads  of  Jews  actually  in  Palestine,  but  the  race  of  fourteen 
or  fifteen  millions  from  which  streams  of  immigration  are  to 
pour.  The  ridiculous  argument  has  been  used  that  if  you  are 
to  count  the  individuals  outside  Palestine,  then  there  too  the 
Arabs  far  outnumber  the  Jews.  But  these  Arabs  outside  Pal- 
estine  have  already  their  national  homes;  they  do  not  need 
Palestine. 

112 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

(3)  From  Sir  Herbert  Samuel's  speeches  in  Palestine,  sup- 
plemented by  the  proclamation  of  King  George  V.,  we  gather 
that  the  official  plan  is  for  a  gradual  evolution  of  the  Jewish 
National  Home,  and  that  this  evolution  depends  primarily  on 
the  immigration  of  sufficient  Jews  to  submerge  the  Arab  popula- 
tion, not  however  in  one  sudden  flood,  but  by  small  and  care- 
fully regulated  streams,  according  to  the  economic  conditions. 
But  it  is  doubtful  if  "  safety  first  "  is  a  safe  principle  for  the 
establishment  of  States.  There  is  more  hope  in  the  desperate 
and  undisciplined  stampede  which  would  ensue  from  the  sham- 
bles of  Europe  were  the  Nordau  scheme  adopted.  New  his- 
tory is  never  made  by  efficient  cabinet-ministers.  It  comes 
rather  from  prisons,  and  the  Jewish  future  now  turns  more 
upon  Jabotinsky  than  upon  the  admirable  and  official  Samuel.1 
It  is  obvious  in  any  case  that  even  the  official  plan  has  had  to 
do  away  with  self-determination.  For  if  the  Arabs  had  their 
parliamentary  way,  the  door  to  the  Jews  would  be  "  banged, 
barred,  and  bolted."  In  setting  up  an  unelective  council  of 
administration  the  Government  is  thus  thwarting  this  menace. 
Not  onlv  is  the  device  undemocratic,  but  it  is  illegitimate,  for 
before  the  war  Palestine  —  Arabs  and  Jews  alike  —  had  a  dem- 
ocratic status,  returning  members  to  the  Parliament  at  Con- 
stantinople, and  to  lower  its  status  thus  is  against  all  the  an- 
cient conventions  of  after-warfare,  not  to  mention  that  this 
particular  war  was  fought  "  to  make  the  world  safe  for  democ- 
racy." It  is  thus  clear  that  if  the  "  Jewish  National  Home  " 
is  to  be  built  up  without  an  Arab  trek,  it  can  only  be  by  meth- 
ods strictly  unconstitutional.  This  Mr.  Balfour  in  his  latest 
utterance  has  not  denied,  pleading  quite  in  my  own  vein  that 
the  claim  of  the  Jews  upon  Palestine  is,  though  as  peculiar  as 
the  people,  no  real  contradiction  of  "  the  principle  of  self-de- 
termination," and  that  exceptional  problems  need  exceptional 
handling. 

In  fact  without  force  of  a  kind  there  can  be  no  "  Jewish  Na- 
tional Home."  Qui  veut  la  fin  veut  les  moyens.  The  objec- 
tion to  the  evolutionary  form  of  force  is,  however,  that  although 
slow,  it  is  not  sure  —  indeed,  the  only  thing  sure  is  infinite  fric- 
tion. If  unconstitutional  methods  are  to  prevail  over  a  long 
period,  the  nettle  had  best  be  grasped  firmly  at  once  and  the 

i  Lloyd  George  is  reported  to  have  said  that  since  Samuel  went  there, 
Palestine  is  the  one  bright  spot  in  the  world.  This  is  something  to  rejoice 
in,  even  although  it  is  not  the  Jewish  future  that  is  assured,  but  merely  the 
future  of  Palestine. 

113 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

administration  made  Jewish  forthwith,  leaving  the  Arabs  to 
accept  by  intelligent  anticipation  their  inevitable  minority 
status.  The  best  observers  report  that  the  British  conquest  of 
Palestine  found  the  Arabs  ready  to  accept  any  regime,  and  had 
this  malleable  moment  been  seized,  a  Jewish  Government  could 
have  been  established  with  a  general  acquiescence  in  its  justice. 
It  was  the  delay  and  vacillation  which  followed  that  gave 
intrigue  and  opposition  their  opportunity.  But  it  may  not  yet 
be  too  late. 

(4)  The  Holy  Places  can  be  all  reverentially  safeguarded  by 
Jews ;  the  Christian  shrines  by  Hebrew  Christians,  the  Moslem 
by  Hebrew  Mohammedans.  Nothing  would  show  more  convinc- 
ingly that  the  Jewish  State  was  not  a  reactionary  return  to  a 
narrow  and  fanatical  theocracy.  Nor  could  there  be  a  more 
significant  climax  and  conclusion  to  a  great  and  tragic  era  of 
history  than  a  Jewish  guard  of  honour  round  the  tomb  of 
Christ. 

XXVII 

But  the  friction  and  the  bloodshed,  the  strife,  racial  and  re- 
ligious, the  intrigues  and  the  plottings,  and  the  bovcotting 
proclamations  that  have  already  aborted  Zionism,  show  how 
right  is  the  old  tradition  that  associates  the  return  of  the 
Jews  to  Palestine  with  the  millennium.  "  Not  by  might,  nor 
by  power,  but  by  my  spirit,  saith  the  Lord  of  Hosts."  Had 
the  spirit  of  Reason  and  Goodwill,  which  Wilson  invoked,  been 
applied,  had  the  world  turned  from  cockpit  to  commonwealth, 
had  politics  for  once  become  religion,  had  in  short  the  victorious 
Allies  approached  their  problem  in  the  spirit  of  their  professed 
faith,  there  would  have  been  a  world-wide  spiritual  uplifting, 
and  a  real  restoration  of  the  Jews  to  Palestine  would  have  be- 
come possible.  For  the  repartition  of  the  planet  on  the  "  prin- 
ciple of  nationality  "  would  have  proceeded  in  Palestine,  as 
everywhere  else,  in  the  new  spirit;  to  which  the  Arabs,  like  all 
other  peoples,  would  have  vibrated.  A  great  wave  of  peace 
would  have  flooded  the  world. 

"  Who  shall  ascend  into  the  hill  of  the  Lord?  or  who  shall  stand 
in  his  holy  place?  "  asks  the  Psalmist. 

"  He  that  hath  clean  hands,  and  a  pure  heart;  who  hath  not  lifted 
up  his  soul  unto  vanity,  nor  sworn  deceitfully." 

But  the  Powers  brought  neither  cleanness  of  hands  nor  pur- 

114. 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ity  of  heart,  nor  were  they  innocent  of  dark  and  deceitful 
treaties.  Palestine,  instead  of  being  a  sacred  trust,  was  merely 
a  bone  over  which  France  and  England  squabbled,  and  the  sur- 
render of  which  to  all-avaricious  England,  in  common  with  the 
oil  of  Mosul,  has  been  openly  deplored  by  M.  Briand. 

My  whole  conception  of  an  amicable  Arab  trek  into  Syria  or 
other  of  the  new  and  neighbouring  Arab  States,  rested  on  the 
hypothesis  that  these  States  were  to  be  set  up  genuinely: 
whereas  we  have  seen  Syria  overrun  by  French  imperialism, 
and  just  as  I  was  formerly  revolted  by  Prince  Feisal's  grasping 
and  ungenerous  pan-Arabism,  so  have  my  sympathies  under- 
gone a  revulsion  in  favour  of  this  downfallen  puppet  of  Eng- 
land and  France. 

Even  now,  were  France  willing  to  retire  from  Syria,  a  bar- 
gain could  in  all  probability  be  struck  by  the  Powers  with 
Prince  Feisal  for  recognising  Palestine  as  a  Jewish  State.  But 
French  imperialism  is  still  more  blatant  than  British  —  is  not 
this  Erastian  State,  whose  nuns  fled  from  it,  protector  of  "  the 
Christendom  of  the  East?  "  To  speak  of  "  sacred  "  trusts  or 
anything  sacred  except  sacro  egoismo  in  such  a  connection 
would  be  blasphemous.  Not  from  such  a  whirlpool  of  insane 
imperialisms  can  the  calm  currents  of  universal  justice  pro- 
ceed. Thus  the  ancient  Rabbis  who  asserted  the  futility  and 
even  the  f  rowardness  of  redemption  through  the  medium  of  man, 
were,  though  they  played  into  the  hands  of  the  otiose  and  inert, 
profounder  than  one  realised.  "  Hitherto,"  they  pointed  out, 
"  ye  have  been  redeemed  by  flesh  and  blood,  and  ye  have  been 
returned  again  and  again  to  servitude  and  exile."  It  is  not  in- 
deed till  mankind  gets  the  new  heart  and  the  new  spirit  that 
Ezekiel  demanded  of  his  people,  it  is  not  till  the  Holy  Ghost 
moves  through  humanity  establishing  a  true  brotherhood  of  the 
peoples,  that  Israel  can  be  redeemed  in  any  but  a  piecemeal  and 
evanescent  fashion.  The  augurs  at  Rome  forbore  to  smile 
when  they  met  one  another.  How  European  statesmen  are  able 
to  conduct  their  Conferences  with  so  owlish  a  mien,  still  more 
how  they  can  keep  from  winking  when  talking  to  us  of  these 
moral  "  Mandates,"  which  so  mysteriously  correspond  with 
their  secret  treaties  and  ambitions,  is  a  standing  marvel.  They 
must  assuredly  assume  in  us  a  sane t a  simplicitas  beyond  the 
sucking  babe's.  "  Were  they  ashamed  when  they  had  com- 
mitted abomination?  "  asked  Jeremiah,  speaking  of  those  who 
said  "  Peace,  peace,  when  there  was  no  peace."  "  Nay,  they1 
were  not  at  all  ashamed,  neither  could  they  blush." 

115 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Once  upon  a  time  there  was  no  urgent  call  for  thinkers  to  in- 
tervene in  politics,  at  any  rate  not  in  the  detail  of  politics.  If 
the  world  did  not  always  go  very  well,  it  was  not  heading  for 
bankruptcy  or  "  rattling  back  to  barbarism."  There  was  al- 
ways an  opposition  party  to  check  overweening  folly  —  the 
rival  fools  had  not  discovered  how  to  retain  office  indefi- 
nitely by  pooling  their  power.  The  wiser  politicians  might 
not  be  so  profound  as  they  seemed  to  their  followers,  but  at 
least  a  Gladstone  brought  moral  energy  and  a  Disraeli  intel- 
lectual force  to  current  affairs,  and  the  word  of  a  Cabinet  Min- 
ister stood  at  par.  Nobody  in  my  young  days  would  have 
dared  to  stand  up  in  Parliament,  as  Lord  Curzon  has  stood  up 
in  the  House  of  Lords,  and  gravely  profess  that  the  Palestine 
mandate  was  dependent  for  its  content  on  the  League  of  Na- 
tions (which  had  not  conferred  it)  or  that  the  Allies  had  agreed 
to  recognise  Syria  as  an  independent  State  —  under  the  man- 
date of  France!  With  similar  aplomb  Mr.  Bonar  Law  has 
pacified  the  Commons,  Lord  Robert  Cecil  included,  by  ex- 
plaining that  England's  promise  to  set  up  an  Arab  State  in 
Syria  was  qualified  by  the  proviso :  "  Without  detriment  to 
the  interests  of  her  Ally,  France."  There  is  nothing  in  Lewis 
Carroll  more  grotesque  than  this  brazen  use  of  the  word  "  in- 
dependent "  to  cover  practical  annexation ;  and  it  shows  an 
insolent  contempt  for  public  opinion,  which  perhaps  public 
opinion  that  endures  the  insolence  deserves. 

XXVIII 

There  is  no  correcting  balance  to  be  found  in  the  bulk  of 
the  Fourth  Estate.  On  the  contrary.  It  is  a  newspaper  — 
the  Temps  —  that  has  made  perhaps  the  most  impudent  state- 
ment of  our  generation.  Commenting  on  the  Emir  Feisal's 
righteous  resistance  to  France's  "  occupation  "  of  Syria,  this 
journal  said:  "  The  Allies  did  not  conquer  Prussian  militarism 
to  allow  the  development  in  its  place  of  a  Hedjaz  militarism, 
which  will  set  aflame  the  Arab  world." 

"  These  are  the  new  Dark  Ages,"  wrote  Tennyson,  better  in- 
spired than  he  knew,  "  the  days  of  the  popular  press."  They 
are  dark  not  with  ignorance  but  with  ink.  The  press,  orig- 
inally created  to  give  light,  now  functions  to  exclude  it,  and 
this  artificial  inspissation  leaves  us  in  a  far  greater  fog  than  in 
the  primitive  days  before  Gutenberg's  invention.  Some  of  the 
Hebrew  incunabula  contain  poems  in  honour  of  printing,  which 

116 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

is  glorified  as  the  art  of  writing  at  one  time  with  many  pens. 
It  may  now  be  defined  as  the  art  of  lying  at  one  time  with  many 
mouths.  The  first  Hebrew  compositors  were  not  regarded  as 
artisans,  but  entitled  "  performers  of  a  holy  work,"  and  this 
label  still  survives  among  the  credulous  people  of  Apella 
Judasus.  Christendom  has  evolved  the  more  accurate  locution 
of  the  printer's  devil. 

An  American  writer  enumerates  the  dozen  foremost  organs  of 
America  which  have  refused  to  insert  an  article  of  his  in  miti- 
gation of  the  popular  view  of  Bolshevism.  It  is,  he  observes, 
"  the  greatest  campaign  of  falsification  in  the  history  of  man- 
kind." He  is  perhaps  forgetting  the  antithetical  glorifica- 
tion of  the  old  Russia,  which  preceded  the  war.  But  the  fact 
remains  that  our  century  has  witnessed  the  reduction  of  men- 
dacity to  a  profession,  and  of  its  diffusion  to  a  science.  It  is 
an  unconscious  tribute  to  the  goodness  of  man's  heart  and  the 
soundness  of  his  instincts,  that  the  truth  must  be  hidden  from 
him. 

George  Eliot  inveighed  against  the  debasement  of  the  moral 
currency :  to-day  there  is  not  merely  debasement,  there  is  shame- 
less falsification,  shillings  marked  sovereigns,  and  florins  farth- 
ings, and  threepenny-bits  swaggering  as  half-crowns,  and  in 
this  currency  we  have  to  exchange  our  thoughts.  We  are  liv- 
ing —  as  I  said  in  an  earlier  book  —  in  one  of  those  eras  de- 
scribed by  Mommsen  in  which  words  no  longer  correspond  with 
things.  Writers  whose  profession  it  is  to  seek  out  delicacies 
and  subtleties  of  vocabulary  are  expected  to  accept  as  equiva- 
lents terms  grossly  antithetical,  and  "  the  fell  incensed  points 
of  mighty  opposites  "  are  swamped 

"  In  the  common  deluge  drowning  old  political  common-sense." 

The  British  Academy  ought  to  give  us  a  dictionary,  defining 
within  what  limits  a  word  may  loop  the  loop.  Meantime  Slav- 
ery is  Freedom,  and  Imperialism  is  Idealism,  and  Chauvinism  is 
Christianity,  and  Negotiations  with  a  Government  fail  to  imply 
Recognition  of  it,  and  to  divide  up  a  country  is  to  guarantee 
its  integrity,  and  the  Jews  are  to  have  a  national  home  in  a 
country  populated  by  Arabs  and  ruled  by  British.  It  is  no 
longer  the  Oscar  Wildes  that  sound  paradoxical,  it  is  those  who 
stand  up  for  the  simplest  political  morality  or  decency,  or  the 
simplest  British  ideals. 

117 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  Milton,  thou  should'st  be  living  at  this  hour: 
England  hath  need  of  thee." 

The  bulk  of  Englishmen  seem  to  have  forgotten  that  if  their 
forefathers  after  a  struggle  of  centuries  ejected  from  the  State 
I  inventive  arrest  or  orders  in  Council,  it  was  not  from  mere 
abstract  objection  to  legislative  fads  but  because  without  the 
protection  of  Habeas  Corpus,  trial  by  jury  and  free  parlia- 
ments, no  man  stood  safe.  Bitter  experience  lav  behind  their 
demands,  as  it  lies  again  before  their  descendants.  All  these 
harsh  lessons  will  have  to  be  learnt  afresh  unless  Englishmen 
at  once  shake  off  this  new  stifling  network  of  bureaucracy,  as 
Samson  shook  off"  the  green  withes  and  new  ropes  of  the  Philis- 
tines. The  war  for  freedom,  while  enlarging  England's  Em- 
pire and  confirming  her  command  of  the  seas,  has  turned  her 
into  a  tyranny.  Eor  my  part  I  see  no  satisfaction  in  ruling 
the  waves  if  you  are  chained  to  the  oar. 

The  poet  Cowper,  a  Bigger  Englander  than  Kipling,  since  he 
valued  the  greatness  of  England  by  its  value  to  all  humanity, 
boasted  that  the  slave  whose  foot  touched  our  soil  was  free. 
That  freedom  has  been  England's  greatest  asset  on  the  Conti- 
nent. More  than  her  wealth  it  gave  her  the  leadership  of  the 
world.  To-day  the  slave's  foot  would  never  even  succeed  in 
touching  her  soil.  A  barbed  wire  entanglement,  bristling  with 
Bumbles  —  detectives,  excise  men,  passport  functionaries,  what 
not  —  would  prevent  his  landing.  And  such  slaves  —  such 
poor  victims  of  Continental  autocracies  — -  whose  feet  did  touch 
our  soil  ten  or  twenty  years  ago,  are  being  deported  without 
trial,  without  reason,  under  irresponsible  denunciation,  some- 
times after  an  internment  equally  monstrous,  suspected  yester- 
day of  being  pro-Germans  and  to-day  badgered  as  Bolshevists. 

I  happened  to  come  across  the  "  Annual  Register  "  for  1792 
—  the  year  when  I  he  French  had  executed  their  King  and  the 
Revolutionary  Republic  was  calling  on  all  nations  to  rise 
against  their  rulers.  There  was  the  same  panic-stricken  de- 
mand in  Parliament  for  an  Aliens'  Bill  —  only  this  time  it  was 
to  keep  out  the  French,  whose  seditious  emissaries  might  over- 
run the  State.  The  British  histories  of  the  period  all  repre- 
sent the  French  as  the  most  dangerous  of  all  peoples,  multi- 
plying in  numbers,  entrenched  in  the  centre  of  Europe,  and  aim- 
ing at  universal  domination. 


118 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

XXIX 

"  Great  men  are  not  always  wise,"  says  Job,  "  nor  do  old  men 
understand."  But  to-day  the  world's  great  men  seem  never 
wise  and  none  of  them  is  young  enough  to  know  better.  Zola 
ends  his  novel  "  La  Debacle  "  by  picturing  an  engine  driver 
fallen  dead  on  his  engine,  while  the  long  train  of  crowded  car- 
riages goes  roaring  onwards  into  the  night.  On  such  a  blind 
train  I  feel  myself  a  helpless  passenger,  without  the  bliss  of 
ignorance  as  to  the  driver's  condition.  There  is  even  worse 
than  no-guidance,  there  is  misguidance,  positive  steering  for 
collisions,  as,  for  example,  of  the  white  and  coloured  races. 
The  Japanese  victory  over  Russia  in  1905  —  the  cardinal  event 
of  modern  history  —  had  undermined  in  the  overwhelming 
masses  of  the  coloured  peoples  the  illusion  of  some  magical  su- 
periority in  the  white,  and  thus  shaken  the  stability  of  the  bal- 
ance of  colour-power.  Yet  France  and  England  dared  to  enlist 
coloured  troops  of  all  sorts  in  the  Great  War  and  to  equip 
them  ultra-scientifically  against  the  white  man,  even  quarter- 
ing them  finally  in  Frankfort  and  —  as  if  symbolically  —  in 
Goethe's  house!  At  the  same  time  the  grievances  of  the  col- 
oured populations  of  the  world,  especially  of  the  Africans,  are 
neither  abated  nor  placated.  Everywhere  there  are  rumblings 
and  mutterings  of  the  coming  storm,  and  if  we  had  the  least 
sense  of  proportion  we  white  races  would  abandon  our  jeal- 
ousies and  rival  imperialisms,  precisely  as  the  Kaiser  suggested 
long  ago  in  a  cartoon,  and  run  up  a  League  of  White  Nations 
at  least,  before  we  reap  the  whirlwind  that  we  have  sown  in 
wind.  But  in  an  era  of  cataclysms  more  colossal  than  the 
world  has  ever  known,  its  affairs  are  in  the  hands  of  persons 
who  for  light  and  leading  give  us  darkness  and  misleading, 
whose  official  statements  alternate  between  falsehood  and  auda- 
cious nonsense,  and  whose  policy  wriggles  along  by  devious  and 
underground  routes  to  obscure  and  catastrophic  ends.  It 
would  have  been  a  humiliation  for  a  cause  associated  with  eight- 
een centuries  of  prayer  to  owe  its  success  to  such  tarnished  in- 
struments, though  the  effort  to  do  one  right  thing  unselfishly 
might  have  served  to  cleanse  them.  That  the  Jewish  future  in 
Palestine  should  have  been  exposed  to  the  sordid  bargainings 
of  such  a  Peace  Conference  is  a  tragedy  with  scarcely  a  re- 
deeming feature. 

Lord  Robert  Cecil  said  at  the  same  Zionist  Demonstration  at 

119 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

which  Mr.  Balfour  sought  to  shuffle  off  his  responsibility  upon 
Arab  magnanimity,  that  "  when  the  history  of  the  war  came  to 
be  written,  lie  believed  bhat  the  two  outstanding  features  would 
be  the  establishment  of  the  national  Jewish  home  and  the  crea- 
tion of  the  League  of  Nations.  They  represented  the  great 
ideals  for  which  we  fought  and  by  which  we  conquered." 

It  is  perfectly  true  that  we  conquered  by  means  of  these  great 
ideals.  But  it  is  equally  true  that  we  have  kicked  away  the 
ladders  by  which  we  mounted.  Lord  Robert  Cecil's  optimism  is 
sublime,  for  at  the  moment  it  requires  the  eye  of  faith  to  see 
either  a  League  of  Nations  or  a  Jewish  National  Home  as  a 
sequel  of  the  war.  Tempted  of  the  spirit  —  to  use  a  phrase 
of  Berenson's  —  mankind  has  alas  !  resisted.  And  the  fiasco  of 
the  League  is  infinitely  more  tragic  than  that  of  Zionism,  which 
concerns  only  a  single  people.  That  humanity  standing  at  the 
cross-roads  of  history  should  have  failed  to  take  the  turning  to 
the  right,  is  the  saddest  episode  in  all  man's  long  tragic  ad- 
venture. And  with  all  mankind  bruised  and  bereaved,  the  solic- 
itation to  the  path  of  peace  was  so  unparalleled.  Nor  was  the 
voice  of  the  League's  prophet  vox  clamantis  in  deserto. 

Never  had  man  born  of  woman  such  a  housetop  to  speak 
from,  never  were  so  many  people  prepared  to  hear,  as  through 
a  megaphone,  the  voice  of  Jerusalem,  of  which  this  great  Amer- 
ican Puritan  seemed  the  inspired  medium. 

"  How  art  thou  fallen,  O  Lucifer,  son  of  the  morning!  " 

It  was  not  wholly  the  tragedy  of  the  honest  man  fallen  among 
thieves,  there  was  also  internal  weakness. 

"  We  are  betrayed  by  what  is  false  within." 

XXX 

The  alternative  Woodrow  Wilson  set  up  of  the  world  as  com- 
monwealth or  the  world  as  cockpit  was  not  clearly  faced  even 
by  himself.  "Under  which  King,  Bezonian?"  The  incoher- 
ence of  the  Peace  Conference  was  due  to  its  trying  to  pay  alle- 
giance simultaneously  to  both.  Never  in  fact  in  human  history 
has  anything  been  so  written  about  and  so  little  thought  out  as 
the  League  of  Nations.  One  imagined  from  certain  noble  and 
luminous  utterances  that  at  least  Wilson  understood  it.  But 
'tis  a  wise  father  that  knows  his  own  child,  and  the  complacency 

120 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

with  which  he  carried  back  on  the  George  Washington  a  gro- 
tesque changeling  argues  that  he  had  no  real  acquaintance  with 
the  cherub  he  begot  on  the  world's  imagination.  We  have  in- 
deed his  own  confession  of  the  humorous  surprise  with  which 
he  suddenly  realised  that  under  his  League  there  would  be  no 
neutrals,  so  that  the  vexed  question  of  the  Freedom  of  the  Seas 
would  not  arise.  But  even  this  confession  was  a  further  error, 
for,  apart  from  the  nations  excluded,  the  conditions  of  the 
League  allow  any  existing  member  to  withdraw  after  due  no- 
tice, and  thus  to  become  a  neutral  in  any  wars  waged  by  the 
League. 

Months  before  he  sailed  for  Paris,  he  had  pontificated  upon 
the  League  and  upon  the  indispensability  of  its  inclusion  in  the 
Peace  Treaty,  but  his  sense  of  papal  infallibility  seems  unshaken 
even  by  his  own  avowal  of  his  misconceptions  or  by  the  con- 
sciousness he  can  hardly  escape  that  on  the  question  of  Peace 
or  War  he  had  boxed  the  political  compass.  He  still  stoutly 
maintains  that  "  the  work  of  the  Conference  squares  as  a 
whole  with  the  principles  agreed  upon  as  the  basis  of  peace." 
It  is  a  happy  and  enviable  temperament,  but  it  belongs  rather 
to  the  Chadbands  than  to  the  Christs. 

Had  President  Wilson  returned  home  heart-broken  at  his 
defeat  by  the  dark  forces  of  Europe,  he  would  have  been  the 
greatest  success  in  human  history.  But  that  he  should  have 
triumphantly  waved  scraps  of  paper  from  which  the  Four- 
teen Points  have  been  practically  erased,  here  is  the  true  trag- 
edy of  his  downfall.     It  adds  his  own  failure  to  the  world's. 

We  need  only  compare  Mr.  Wilson's  appraisal  of  the  Ver- 
sailles achievement  with  that  of  General  Smuts,  who  has  re- 
placed him  as  humanity's  hope,  to  measure  the  depth  of  his 
fall.  For  the  voice  is  now  that  of  the  politician  pleading  that 
the  intricate  pattern  of  international  relationship  was  cut  too 
deep  by  historic  circumstances  to  be  ignored  or  reversed.  The 
belated  discovery  does  as  little  credit  to  Wilson,  the  historian, 
as  his  failure  to  transcend  the  historic  obstacles  did  to  the 
man  of  action.  Just  as  Balfour  should  have  secured  Pales- 
tine by  accord  with  the  Arabs  before  launching  his  Declaration 
to  the  Jews,  so  before  entering  the  war,  whose  issue  he  held  in 
the  hollow  of  his  hand,  should  Wilson  have  bound  Europe  by 
contract  to  his  principles  and  swept  away  the  "  old  entangle- 
ments "  ;  especially  those  entanglements  which  he  indicts  —  and 
it  is  a  curious  indictment  from  the  man  who  had  allied  America 
with  these  Governments  on  account  of  their  unmitigated  right- 

121 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

eousness  —  as  "  promises  which  Governments  had  made  to  one 
another  in  days  when  Might  and  Right  were  confused."  To 
break  with  past  history  was  precisely  what  he  had  preached  as 
the  world's  great  need.  Mankind  was  to  take  a  leap  in  the 
light  and  to  rise  into  a  new  plane  of  world-unity-  A  new  heart, 
General  Smuts  reminds  us,  was  to  be  given  to  us,  no  less  than 
to  our  enemies,  being,  as  we  are,  all  members  of  one  another. 
We  were  to  be  just,  even  to  those  to  whom  we  did  not  wish  to 
be  just.  Alas!  the  Peace  —  especially  the  Austrian  Peace  — 
is  less  just  than  many  a  Treaty  under  the  old  order.  So  far 
from  the  spirit  of  the  brotherhood  of  mankind  pervading  the 
Conference,  the  Big  Four  who  made  the  Peace  could  hardly  keep 
it  among  themselves. 

Not  that  Mr.  Wilson  had  forgotten  his  ideal.  Indeed  it  was 
his  undoing.  Lured  on  by  his  dream  and  fooled  to  the  top 
of  his  bent,  he  sold  the  Peace  in  exchange  for  the  League  of 
Nations,  and  was  fobbed  off  with  a  simulacrum.  For  the 
League  of  Nations  that  was  palmed  off  on  him  is  merely  a  de- 
vice for  guaranteeing  the  injustices  of  the  Peace  Treaty  and 
eternalising  them.  Both  as  a  bargainer  and  an  apostle  Presi- 
dent Wilson  suffered  defeat. 


XXXI 

Not  only  is  the  League  not  a  League  of  Nations,  nor  the 
Peace  Treaty  a  Treaty  of  Peace,  but  President  Wilson's  ten- 
aciously achieved  embodiment  of  the  first  in  the  second  was  a 
triumph  as  hollow  as  the  rest.  For  the  whole  point  of  the  in- 
corporation of  the  League  in  the  Peace  Treaty  was  that  the 
co-existence  of  this  covenant  of  co-operation,  this  new  world- 
order,  would  react  enormously  upon  the  nature  of  the  settlement, 
substituting  as  it  must  goodwill  for  hate,  and  reducing  racial 
frictions  to  a  minimum  by  the  world-policy  of  the  open  door  and 
free  and  equal  access  to  ports,  harbours  and  railways.  In  par- 
ticular, boundary  questions  could  be  denuded  of  their  signifi- 
cance, for  the  security  of  the  individual  frontier  would  depend 
not  on  its  fortresses  nor  its  geographical  barriers  but  on  the 
joint  protection  of  the  peoples. 

But  instead  of  the  new  world-order  influencing  the  Peace 
Settlement,  that  Treaty  is  drawn  up  on  the  assumption  of  the 
constancy  of  the  bad  old  world-order,  and  security  of  frontier 
has  been  pursued  even  to  the  sacrifice  of  the  vaunted  "  prin- 
ciple of  nationality."     Indeed,  so  far  from  the  League  reacting 

122 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

on  the  Peace  Settlement  in  mitigation,  it  is  —  as  already  indi- 
cated —  the  harshness  of  the  Peace  Settlement  that  has  reacted 
on  the  League.  In  being  associated  with  the  Peace  Treaty,  the 
League  of  Nations  has  touched  pitch  and  been  defiled.  Far 
better  had  the  League  been  created  in  the  calm  of  Peace. 

For  instead  of  facilitating  and  simplifying  the  Peace  Settle- 
ment, as  complicated  issues  are  lightened  the  moment  the 
parties  come  together  in  goodwill,  it  has  added  its  own  asym- 
metry and  lack  of  principle  to  the  cumbrous  complexity  of  the 
Treaty.  The  two  covenants  have  indeed  been  signed  as  one, 
but  despite  their  common  taint,  the  union  remains  monstrous 
and  hybrid.  The  mountain  in  labour  has  produced  a  flitter- 
mouse,  an  uncouth  and  sinister  bat. 

It  is  not,  in  fact,  a  League  of  Nations  that  has  been  brought 
forth,  but  a  League  of  Damnations.  Despite  the  promise  of 
preferential  treatment  to  a  democratised  Germany,  the  united 
vengeances  of  England,  France  and  America  have  been  wreaked 
upon  the  German  Republic  in  the  concoction  of  the  Peace  terms, 
which  involve  too  a  protracted  alliance  to  ensure  that  the  con- 
ditions are  exacted  and  the  handicap  of  them  never  henceforth 
transcended.  In  diminishing  and  crippling  Germany  to  the  ut- 
most possible  and  in  building  up  against  her  resurrection  a 
barrier  of  new  nations,  revived  or  created,  lie  at  once  punish- 
ment and  security.  The  procedure  is  not  illegitimate.  Ger- 
many herself  admits  a  measure  of  guilt  and  had  challenged 
forces  by  which  she  is  abased  and  chastised.  Nor  is  it  im- 
possible that  a  warless  world  is  henceforth  practically  secure, 
when  finally  the  last  cracklings  of  this  gigantic  forest-fire  grow 
silent.  Hate  as  well  as  Love,  Death  as  well  as  Life,  may  bring 
Peace.  The  spine  of  Germany  may  be  irremediably  broken, 
and  the  proved  colossal  cost  and  ferocity  of  modern  war  may 
suffice  to  keep  a  soulless  peace  among  her  imperialist  rivals, 
even  though  France  celebrates  her  victory  by  the  sinister  sym- 
bolism of  the  Gallic  cock  crowing  above  the  piled  German  guns 
in  the  Champs  Elysees. 

What  is  revolting,  however,  is  the  pretence  that  the  League 
of  Hate  is  a  League  of  Love,  that  the  disintegration  of  Austria 
and  the  magnification  of  Poland  are  due  primarily  to  a  rever- 
ence for  nationality,  and  that  a  new  world-order  can  be  erected 
on  Nemesis. 


12S 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


XXXII 

Wilson  defined  the  object  of  his  League  as  to  keep  justice 
between  nations.  That  is  hardly  ensured  by  a  clause  like  Ar- 
ticle X,  which  seeks  to  entail  the  spoils  of  war  and  render  them 
the  inalienable  property  of  the  present  conquerors.  The  Ar- 
ticle in  question  might  lead  to  monstrous  injustices,  not  only 
against  the  defeated  countries,  but  even  among  the  present  Al- 
lies. France,  for  example,  might  reduce  her  birth  rate  still 
lower,  and  while  Belgium  overflowed  with  a  vigorous  white  pop- 
ulation seeking  land  in  vain,  the  denuded  soil  of  France  might  be 
monopolised  by  a  small  slave-owning  aristocracy  reposing  on 
the  industrial  labours  of  prolific  immigrants  from  the  Franco- 
African  Colonies.  Instead  of  a  pact  to  guarantee  one  an- 
other's territorial  integrity,  the  leagued  nations  should  have 
undertaken  to  re-adjust  one  another's  frontiers  according  to 
the  variations  of  populations  or  their  economic  situation. 

Lord  Robert  Cecil  claims  indeed  that  the  League  recognises 
the  case  for  continuous  re-adjustment,  though  it  insists  that 
this  shall  be  effected  not  by  violence  but  by  discussion  and  de- 
bate. It  is  true  there  is  a  provision  that  disputes  shall  be  re- 
ferred to  arbitration,  but  the  arbitrators  would  surely  have  to 
recognise  that  such  disputes  cannot  embrace  redistribution  of 
territories,  since  any  diminution  of  boundaries  has  been  barred 
for  all  time  by  Article  X.  Moreover  were  the  League's  object 
really  to  do  justice  between  the  nations,  it  would  at  once  apply 
self-determination  to  the  conquests  of  its  own  members ;  Shan- 
tung would  cease  to  trouble  and  Egypt  be  at  rest.  A  British 
Gibraltar  or  a  French  Syria  would  become  unthinkable.  All 
rankling  grievances  thus  removed  and  their  recurrence  provided 
against,  a  small  common  force  would  suffice  to  police  the  planet. 
But  the  League  being  not  a  League  of  Nations,  but  of  Damna- 
tions, justice  other  than  primitive  cannot  enter  into  it. 

So  far  is  this  petrifaction  of  ancient  injustices  admitted,  that 
at  the  last  annual  meeting  of  the  Anti-Slavery  and  Aborigines 
Protection  Society,  such  an  advocate  of  the  League  of  Nations 
as  Professor  Gilbert  Murray  took  it  for  granted  that  in  for- 
bidding the  Powers  to  use  their  black  troops  for  their  wars, 
the  Covenant's  ukase  ran  only  over  new  territories.  For  ex- 
ample, France  could  not  raise  such  a  slave-army  in  the  Cam- 
eroons.  But  there  was  nothing  to  prevent  her  from  shipping 
her  unfortunate  Moors   or  Algerians   to  be  murdered  in  her 

124. 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

European  disputes.  Similarly,  as  Mr.  Morel  reminds  us  in 
"  The  Black  Man's  Burden,"  though  the  mandatory  system  is 
to  prevail  at  least  nominally  over  those  portions  of  Africa 
which  have  been  wrested  from  Germany,  the  white  man  is  al- 
lowed to  batten  upon  the  negro  everywhere  else  in  that  Dark 
Continent,  unrestrained  by  international  control. 

Principles  of  world-control  that  are  not  retrospective  in  time, 
nor  universal  in  space,  recall  the  famous  Pensee  of  Pascal: 
"  Three  degrees  of  latitude  upset  all  jurisprudence.  A  merid- 
ian decides  on  truth;  in  a  few  years  of  possession  fundamental 
laws  change;  right  has  its  epochs  .  .  .  Plaisante  justice  qu'une 
riviere  borne!     Verite  au  deca  des  Pyrenees,  erreur  au  dela." 

Such  piece-meal  justice  has,  no  doubt,  that  strong  flavour  of 
practicality  beloved  of  Britain,  and  recommended  by  Lord  Rob- 
ert Cecil,  international  ethics  broadening  "  slowly  down  from 
precedent  to  precedent."  But  to  the  Semitic  mind  it  all  ap- 
pears like  the  behaviour  of  a  gang  of  burglars  who  having 
divided  a  huge  windfall  of  swag  move  into  a  respectable  sub- 
urb, resolved  to  live  honestly  for  the  future,  though  not  with- 
out subsidies  from  the  thieves'  kitchen  still  operating  for  their 
benefit  in  Seven  Dials. 

As  for  the  idea  that  this  victorious  group,  though  it  refuses 
to  apply  retrospective  restoration  to  its  own  ancient  spoils  of 
war,  is  entitled  to  deal  out  retrospective  retribution  upon  guilty 
warmakers,  the  best  answer  to  this  Pharisaic  claim  is  given  in 
the  mere  title  of  a  book  by  an  obscure  Jew  of  Bristol :  "  Jus- 
tice versus  Neutrality."  The  very  fact  that  neutrality  is  a 
recognised  war-status  shows  that  there  is  as  yet  no  common 
duty  of  international  justice.  International  ethics  not  having 
been  yet  instituted,  there  is  in  the  legal  sense  neither  crime 
nor  competent  court.  The  nations  are  uncouth  monsters, 
ranging  at  their  free  will  as  in  the  antediluvian  age.  Individ- 
uals may  be  saints,  but  the  biological  organism  which  they  con- 
stitute recognises,  in  the  last  resort,  no  will  but  that  of  the 
stronger;  in  our  corporate  capacity  we  are  demoniac.  If  jus- 
tice is  to  reign  over  these  anarchic  monsters,  there  can  be  no 
more  neutrals,  as  Wilson  belatedly  discovered.  Meantime,  for 
a  public  incurably  idealist  and  deceivable,  the  poor  politicians 
have  the  burden  of  expressing  the  lawlessness  of  the  interna- 
tional jungle  in  terms  of  the  internal  ethics,  and  must  make 
Machiavelli  sound  like  the  voice  of  Jerusalem. 

No  less  brazen  than  Wilson,  Mr.  Lloyd  George  denies  that 
the  triple  agreement  within  the  Covenant  "  shows  a  lack  of  faith 

125 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

in  the  League  of  Nations."  "  On  the  contrary,"  he  urges 
bouncingly,  "  the  League  of  Nations  will  be  of  no  value  unless 
it  has  the  sanction  behind  it  of  strong  nations,  prepared  at  a 
moment's  notice  to  stop  the  aggression."  With  such  childish 
quibbles  do  the  helmsmen  of  humanity  seek  to  conceal  the  error 
of  their  courses. 

There  is  no  need  at  all  of  strong  nations  inside  the  League,  so 
long  as  there  are  no  strong  nations  outside.  Their  union  is 
strength,  and  all  the  strength  necessary.  Even  it'  the  League 
inherits  strong  nations  from  the  old  order,  why  destroy  the  re- 
sponsibility of  the  whole  by  putting  all  the  work  on  the  part? 
By  the  notorious  Article  X  ever}*  member  undertakes  to  pre- 
serve every  other  against  aggression.  Why  then  limit  this 
duty  to  the  "  strong  nations  "  or  confine  it  to  German  aggres- 
sion? Even  while  the  Peace  Conference,  which  was  supposed  to 
create  the  world-commonwealth,  was  in  session,  a  dozen  aggres- 
sions by  the  smaller  nationalities  continued  to  keep  the  world  a 
cockpit.  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  one  of  the  few  British  statesmen 
who  seriously  desire  the  League,  argues  that  this  reinsurance  of 
France  outside  the  League  does  but  specifically  repeat  an  obli- 
gation already  inherent  within  it.  But  why  this  duplication, 
this  double  dealing?  Is  not  the  League  of  Damnations  rock- 
based  enough?  Is  it  feared  that  at  some  future  date  a  member 
friendly  to  Germany  will  refuse  to  commit  the  League  to  a  joint 
attack  upon  her?  If  so,  how  foolish  to  have  made  a  unanimous 
decision  necessary  !  That  was  what  destroyed  the  old  Polish 
Diet  and  incidentally  Poland.  Any  member  had  only  to  say 
"  X/r  pozwalam  "  ("  I  won't  have  it  ")  and  the  proposed  meas- 
ure collapsed,  nay,  the  Diet  itself  was  dissolved.  But  to  this 
constitutional  paralysis  are  all  sittings  of  the  League  reduced. 
Seldom  has  a  contract  been  made  with  so  many  loopholes.  An 
agreement  designed  by  a  firm  of  shady  solicitors  to  protect  a 
bogus  company  could  hardly  be  less  binding.  That  America 
has  only  one  vote  to  Britain's  six  is  no  handicap  when  one  vote 
is  just  as  powerful  as  six,  and  when  Britain  might  even  be  hoist 
with  one  of  her  own  votes. 

Mr.  Lloyd  George,  speaking  at  the  Versailles  Conference, 
said  that  he  had  recently  visited  the  war-zone,  and  in  view  of 
the  desolation  and  horror  the  thought  was  borne  in  forcibly 
upon  him,  could  nations  find  no  better  way  of  adjusting  their 
disputes  than  by  force?  The  thought  was  insincere  or  shal- 
low. Were  the  matter  in  dispute  between  the  nations  the 
beauty  of  their  literature  or  their  women,  the  superiority  of 

126 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

their  culture  or  their  agriculture,  force  would  indeed  be  a  ridic- 
ulous arbiter.  But  what  is  always  in  question  between  two 
peoples  —  disguised  if  at  all  but  superficially  —  is  precisely 
which  is  stronger,  and  how  this  dispute  is  to  be  solved  other 
than  by  force  I  know  not.  As  well  say  the  heavyweight  cham- 
pionship should  be  referred  to  arbitration.  Either  scrap  your 
ideal  of  brute  supremacy,  or  take  it  honestly  into  account. 

XXXIII 

With  the  mass  of  mankind,  the  fashions  of  their  women  are 
not  more  mutable  than  their  morals  and  opinions.  But  it  is  im- 
possible for  a  truly  great  man  to  reverse  his  mentality  within 
a  few  months;  and  Wilson's  change  from  indicting  only  the 
Kaiser  and  Junkerdom  to  chastising  the  whole  German  people, 
caught  in  the  Allied  Peace-Trap,  was  as  violent  as  his  change 
from  the  high  temper  of  "  too  proud  to  fight  "  to  the  crude  mil- 
itarism of  "  force,  force  to  the  utmost,  force  without  stint  or 
limit."  Not  that  Wilson  was  alone  in  the  delusion  that  —  as 
Heine  put  it  —  God's  work  can  be  done  by  the  Devil. 

One  hastens,  like  Figaro,  to  laugh  in  reading  that  old  speech 
by  Lord  Grey  of  Fallodon  in  which  he  said :  "  There  must  be 
no  peace  except  a  peace  which  is  going  to  ensure  that  the  na- 
tions of  Europe  will  live  in  the  future  free  from  the  shadow  of 
militarism,  will  live  in  the  open  air,  and  in  the  light  of  freedom." 

And  I  have  before  me  an  American  compilation  called  "  Win 
the  War  for  Permanent  Peace,"  announced  on  the  cover  as  by 
William  Howard  Taft,  and  the  French  Ambassador,  and  the 
Representatives  of  Great  Britain,  and  the  Secretary  of  the 
Navy,  and  the  Spokesmen  of  Labour,  and  Governors  of  States, 
and  other  National  Leaders.  I  have  a  sardonic  satisfaction  in 
remembering  that  I  mocked  at  the  mongrel  species  of  thinker, 
labelling  it  "The  Military  Pacifist,"  and  essaying  to  jar  this 
fatuous  chorus  by  an  article  on  "  The  Next  War."  There  is 
in  fact  no  way  of  ensuring  peace  through  war.  The  abandon- 
ment of  the  simple  code  of  "  peace  on  earth  and  goodwill  to  all 
men  "  leaves  the  politicians  confronted  with  an  impenetrable 
jungle  of  conflicting  interests,  and  the  law  of  the  jungle  per- 
petuates the  jungle.     Wilson's  first  thoughts  were  best. 

"  The  Pacifists  are  right,  but  stupid,"  he  was  reported  as 
modestly  proclaiming,  when  on  second  thoughts  he  entered  the 
war.  "  I  know  how  to  get  Peace.  They  do  not."  Wilson's 
way  of: getting  Peace  was  to  stave  it  off  for  a  couple  of  years, 

127 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

at  the  cost  of  rivers  of  blood  and  mountains  of  gold,  then  to 
ensue  it  for  eight  months  at  a  Peace  Conference,  to  the  accom- 
paniment of  twenty-three  wars,  and  the  groans  of  a  famished 
and  perislung  Europe,  and  finally  to  end  "  the  war  against 
war  "  by  a  Peace  against  Peace.  Meantime  a  new  and  separate 
war  of  classes  had  sprung  up  the  whole  world  over,  manifesting 
itself  in  not  a  few  countries  by 

"  Red  ruin  and  the  breaking  up  of  Laws." 

To  mark  the  Peace  he  knew  how  to  get,  the  American  Army  and 
Navy  have  been  considerably  increased,  and  in  the  process  of 
getting  it,  his  notorious  land  of  freedom  was  turned  into  a  con- 
script country. 

The  whole  horrible  welter  is  a  monument  to  the  futility  of 
Might.  Possibly,  had  Might  been  really  the  instrument  of 
Right,  instead  of  its  masquerade,  possibly  had  the  sword  been 
really  the  minister  of  the  spirit,  it  might  have  shaped  a  less  un- 
satisfactory world.  But  the  fact  remains  that  righteousness 
has  played  but  a  small  part  in  the  re-carving  of  the  world, 
and  "  from  the  lie  " —  to  quote  Heine  again  — "  there  comes  no 
life." 

If  the  politicians  had  not  already  written  their  doom  by  their 
inability  to  stop  the  war,  their  success  in  stopping  the  Peace 
should  surely  move  mankind  to  relegate  their  whole  order  to  the 
dustheap.  Democracy,  if  it  insists  only  on  leaders  who  flatter 
it,  must  go  to  its  destruction.  If  the  world  is  not  to  perish  in 
its  blindness,  it  must  revert  to  the  leadership  of  thinkers  and 
men  of  faith.  Politics,  I  repeat,  must  become  religion  instead 
of  religion  —  at  the  first  real  call  upon  it  —  becoming  politics. 

From  the  first  volume  (price  two  guineas)  of  a  monumental 
"  History  of  the  Peace  Conference,"  now  coming  out  in  five 
volumes  —  like  a  great  historical  tragedy  in  five  acts  —  I 
gather  that  we  ought  not  to  be  hard  on  the  peace-makers,  for 
the  task  that  confronted  them  —  poor  souls  —  was  nothing  less 
than  the  re-building  of  the  world  which  they  had  so  recklessly 
shattered.  War-at-any-pricc  is  clearly  no  simple  policy.  One 
knew  that  to  set  things  straight  an  army  of  writers  and  stu- 
dents had  been  occupied  almost  as  long  as  the  war  had  lasted, 
and  that  i  heir  historical  excursuses,  population-analyses,  bound- 
ary and  waterway  investigations,  and  reconstructive  proposals 
occupied  many  lorries,  that  President  Wilson,  for  his  part,  not 
relying  on  these  European  presentments,  travelled  with  four 
truck-loads  of  similar  documents   compiled  by  trusty  .Ameri- 

128 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

cans,  and  that  to  grapple  with  all  these  issues  thousands  of 
secretaries  and  typists  (with  special  dress  allowances  for  the 
sex)  were  mobilised,  transported  and  congregated  in  vast  ho- 
tels, and  that  the  number  of  commissions,  committees,  and  sub- 
committees, and  the  chaos  of  questions  that  came  up  for  set- 
tlement, "  stagger  humanity."  Yet  the  bulk  of  this  careful 
preparatory  work  was  thrown  over,  we  are  told;  the  principal 
statesmen  who  had  had  no  time  during  the  war  to  work  out  the 
solutions,  and  who  feared  in  any  case  to  raise  questions  that 
might  divide  the  Allies,  fell  back  upon  ready-made  and  undi- 
gested compromises.  For  never  has  the  historical  law  that  Al- 
lies always  quarrel,  and  that  Peace  divides  what  War  united, 
been  better  vindicated.  They  quarrel  because  they  are  united 
not  by  mutual  love  but  by  a  common  hatred  of  the  enemy?  and 
when  he  is  done  with,  their  own  antagonism  resurges.  Rarely, 
too,  are  they  in  the  war  for  the  ideal  aims  they  have  trumpeted 
forth,  and  victory  leaves  them  wrangling  over  the  spoils.  How 
can  one  expect  them  to  wash  their  dirty  linen  in  public?  Wil- 
son's demand  for  open  discussions  was  of  an  incredible  naivete. 

This  whole  business  of  the  Peace  Conference  has  been  like  the 
calling  out  of  gangs  of  labourers  to  clear  the  roads  after  a  ter- 
rible snowstorm  has  turned  the  whole  country  white  and  impas- 
sable. No  number  of  men  can  cope  with  the  task.  But  let  the 
sun  come  out  strongly  and  in  a  day  the  whole  mass  will  be  melt- 
ing away,  not  of  course  without  floods  and  inconveniences  here 
and  there,  but  still  with  results  infinitely  more  satisfactory  than 
could  be  achieved  by  millions  of  spades  and  shovels.  So,  if  the 
sun  of  universal  love  had  broken  through  the  clouds  of  rival 
racial  egotisms,  all  those  industrious  commissions  and  congested 
lorries  and  scribbling  secretaries  and  flapping  typists  and  bar- 
gaining politicians  would  have  been  superfluous.  The  new 
world  would  have  built  itself,  as  a  snow-bound  country  clears 
itself. 

As  soon  as  it  became  clear  that  both  combatants  were  not  un- 
willing to  accept  the  new  Wilsonian  world-order,  a  truce  could 
have  been  called,  the  blockade  raised,  the  soldiers  sent  home, 
and  a  committee  of  neutrals  set  to  work  out  the  practical  ap- 
plications of  the  Fourteen  Points.  There  was  no  need  of  a 
Conference  either  of  the  conquerors  or  of  the  belligerents.  Sci- 
ence and  truth  are  independent  of  victors  and  vanquished,  and 
ethnographical  boundaries  would  have  been  better  determined 
by  unprejudiced  experts.  But  at  Versailles  it  soon  came  to  be 
recognised  that  the  smaller  Powers  could  not  be  allowed  equal- 

129 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ity,  the  Plenary  Conference  became  a  formal  farce  and  legal 
power  was  made  to  correspond  to  actual  power  —  as  if  Might 
and  not  Right  were  in  question!  How  indeed  could  one  ex- 
pect England  and  France  to  afford  equality  to  the  Hedjaz 
State  which  they  had  just  created,  or  to  black  Liberia? 
Pseudo-idealism  can  never  face  reality.  Unlike  Antaeus  it  per- 
ishes  at  touch  of  mother  earth.  Before  babbling  of  the  League 
of  Nations  the  politicians  should  have  defined  a  nation.  A 
course  of  lectures  at  King's  College  on  the  League  has,  I  observe, 
wound  up  with  the  presentation  of  "  the  doctrine  of  equity  " 
as  the  ultimate  machinery  of  settlement  in  the  differences  of 
nations.  But  what  exactly  is  a  nation?  I  know  none  which 
does  not  expand  and  contract  in  history  like  a  concertina,  and 
the  attempt  to  fix  its  compass  for  ever  at  the  moment  it  suits 
you  is  inspired  by  prudence,  not  pacifism!  To  think  of  bound- 
aries at  all  is  to  be  back  in  the  cockpit  conception. 

Dr.  Johnson  said  that  a  man  of  genius  could  settle  any  ques- 
tion in  five  minutes.  A  man  of  goodwill  could  have  settled  the 
war  in  two. 

With  every  political  grievance  eliminated,  and  Free  Trade  re- 
moving commercial  disabilities,  the  actual  frontiers  or  countries 
would  become  no  more  important  than  the  boundaries  of  a 
British  parish.  For  the  new  world-order,  which  even  politi- 
cians can  only  postpone,  rests  on  the  conception  of  the  world 
as  one  place,  with  every  people  contributing  to  run  it  as  a 
whole,  and  all  united  against  their  only  enemy  —  Nature. 

So  long  as  mankind  refuses  to  accept  this  simple  doctrine, 
so  long  will  it  be  involved  in  quagmires  of  blood  and  labyrinths 
of  hypocrisy. 


XXXIV 

A  Peace  purporting  to  aim  at  a  World-Unity  should  obvi- 
ouslv  have  conserved  jealously  whatever  embryonic  unity  al- 
ready existed  upon  our  racked  planet.  But  on  the  contrary 
we  have  sought  to  dissolve  much  that  was  already  united,  put- 
ting asunder  what  history  had  so  painfully  joined  together. 
Almost,  half  the  Old  World,  for  example,  was  integrated  under 
the  designation  of  Russia;  and  if  we  have  not  welcomed  its  dis- 
integration we  have,  at  least,  produced  it  and  provided  the 
principle  which  justifies  it.  Austria  was  an  amalgam  or  mo- 
saic of  peoples  at  peace:  we  have  broken  it  up  into  warring 

130 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

elements.  Over  large  long-settled  areas  in  more  than  one  con- 
tinent we  have   carefully   engineered   chaos. 

It  is  true  that  Russia  was  ill-governed ;  but  the  remedy  lay 
in  improving  the  Government,  not  in  disuniting  the  governed. 
Bolshevism  may  be  good  or  bad,  but  the  United  States  of  Rus- 
sia would  be  in  greater  congruity  with  World-Peace  than  a 
swarm  of  conflicting  nationalities ;  and  if  the  Bolshevists  can 
succeed  in  re-uniting  them,  they  will  to  that  extent  be  promot- 
ing the  larger  and  truer  ideal.  And  Austria  was  not  even  ill- 
governed;  its  peoples  were  joined,  we  used  to  be  told,  not  by 
tyranny  but  by  economic  necessity  —  it  was  the  Danubian 
State.  And  the  results  of  disregarding  economic  necessity  in 
that  quarter  are  already  tragically  obvious. 

An  American  publicist  has  labelled  this  economic  collapse 
"  the  failure  of  Liberal  idealism."  But  Liberal  idealism  can- 
not be  aspersed  because  of  a  foolish  translation  of  it  into  purely 
racial  terms.  The  "  principle  of  nationality "  is  obviously 
only  one  of  the  considerations  governing  the  life  of  a  State.  It 
demands  that  no  section  of  a  nationality  embedded  in  an  alien 
State  shall  be  crushed  out :  it  does  not  demand  that  the  world 
shall  be  symmetrically  carved  out  into  racial  compartments, 
irrespective  of  whether  they  are  capable  of  economic  existence. 
Or,  if  it  does  demand  it,  it  demands  equally  the  supplementary 
principle  that  there  shall  be  universal  free  trade.  But  by  an 
impudent  posse  of  British  professors  who  dare  not  apply  their 
principle  to  their  own  Empire  (disrupting  French  Canada,  for 
example,  from  British),  the  principle  of  nationality,  which  Lord 
Acton,  the  learned  historian  of  Liberty,  regarded  as  dangerous 
and  reactionary,  was  acclaimed  as  sacred.  Employed  exclu- 
sively as  an  instrument  to  break  up  enemy  territories,  it  added 
Pecksniffian  unction  to  revenge.  But  the  principle  of  nationali- 
ties, though  not  devoid  of  validity,  can  at  most  dictate  internal 
freedom  for  peoples.  It  cannot  prohibit  their  federation.  But 
Austria  delenda  est  —  in  the  name  of  nationality  Austria  was 
to  be  destroyed,  and  by  the  very  Treaty  which  prevented  its 
Germans  uniting  with  Germany  I x 

And  to  add  to  the  paradox  of  this  semi-disintegration  of  Eu- 

i  Reconstruction,  an  admirable  Viennese  organ,  published  in  English,  tells 
us  that  the  partition  of  Austria  has  produced  far  more  unrest  and  oppres- 
sion than  prevailed  under  the  old  order,  for  each  of  the  liberated  national- 
ities now  treads  under  foot  the  minorities  in  its  own  borders.  As  for 
Czecho-Slovakia,  it  appears  that  the  Czechs  are  trampling  upon  the  equal 
autonomy  of  the  Slovaks,  not  to  mention  upon  their  unfortunate  Ger- 
man subjects.     In  fact  a  spawn  of  smaller  Austrias  has  been  brought  forth. 

131 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

rope  in  the  interests  of  World-Unity,  it  lias  been  achieved 
mainly  by  the  intervention  of  America,  which  endured  the  agony 
of  civil  war  rather  than  permit  her  own  partition  on  the  basis 
of  self-determination;  the  land  which  has  been  engaged  for 
generations  in  melting  up  the  quarrelsome  European  medley 
into  a  peaceful  new  type  under  a  single  flag.  Eor  this  has 
America  now  poured  out  her  blood  and  treasure  —  to  keep  per- 
petually separate  the  elements  out  of  which  she  was  constituted, 
each  European  tribe  in  truculent  sovereignty  on  its  own  petty 
territory,  every  cock  crowing  on  its  own  dunghill.  In  Amer- 
ica no  State  language  but  English  is  to  be  tolerated  —  one  must 
be  a  "  hundred-per-cent."  American ;  but  in  Europe  faded 
tongues  and  half-forgotten  patois  will  be  brushed  up  into  na- 
tional languages,  and  the  traveller  must  needs  change  his  idiom 
every  few  hours.  Europe  will  presumably  become  more  than 
ever  a  museum,  where,  under  the  curatorship  of  the  League  of 
Nations,  old-world  types  will  be  kept  in  cold  storage  for  the 
delectation  of  aeroplaning  Americans. 

But  of  course  the  equilibrium  is  too  unstable  to  last  long. 
To  increase  the  number  of  new  nations  without  the  preliminary 
creation  of  a  real  League  of  them,  was  merely  to  multiply  the 
chances  of  conflagration.  It  was  to  add  new  denizens  to  the 
jungle.  Nor  are  these  new  creations  harmonious  even  in  them- 
selves. The  Poles  oppress  the  Jews,  the  Czechs  the  Slovaks, 
the  Roumanians  the  Hungarians,  and  so  ad  infinitum,  or  at 
least  ad  nauseam.  Nothing  but  a  real  League  of  Nations  — 
not  a  League  with  special  alliances  inside  it  and  half  the  na- 
tions outside  —  nothing  but  a  League  incarnating  the  sincere 
mutual  goodwill  of  a  united  humanity  can  bring  us  the  vision 
which  the  great  seer,  Tennyson,  who  anticipated  both  Zeppelins 
and  Wilsonism,  pictured  as  — 

"  Universal  ocean  softly  washing  all  her  warless  isles." 

If  we  obstinately  will  to  continue  the  tragedy  of  mutual  slaugh- 
ter for  unimportant  objects  and  childish  purposes,  let  us  have 
done  with  the  comedy  of  pretending  to  league  ourselves.  Let 
us  recognise  that  the  mania  for  "  sovereign  rights  " —  and 
still  more  for  "  super-sovereign  rights  " — is  behind  the  dogged 
refusal  of  the  peoples  to  join  hands,  and  that  this,  and  not  the 
defectiveness  of  the  present  League,  is  the  real  ground  for  the 
opposition  in  America  to  Wilsonism.  That  America  should 
have  left  Europe  in  the  lurch  is  a  righteous  nemesis  upon  our 

132 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

grabbing  politicians.  But  what  America  wants  is  not  a  good 
League,  but  no  League  at  all,  or  a  nominal  League  with  such 
reservations  as  will  leave  Congress  a  free  hand.  (It  is  only 
political  passion  that  blinds  her  to  the  fact  that  the  present 
League  is  the  very  League  she  craves.)  And  if  America  shies  at 
a  real  League  of  Nations,  it  is  for  the  same  reason  that  Ger- 
many shied  at  it,  because  she  cherished  the  hope  of  succeeding 
—  peacefully  by  preference  —  to  Britain's  hegemony  of  the 
world.  I  quite  admit  it  is  not  fair  to  ask  America  to  surrender 
the  reversion,  if  Britain  will  not  surrender  the  possession,  and 
that  if  the  commonwealth  conception  is  to  prevail,  all  occu- 
pancy of  forts  or  waterways,  and  all  tariffs  that  make  only  for 
the  defence  or  the  ascendancy  of  any  individual  nation,  must 
be  abandoned.  The  world  cannot  be  run  simultaneously  as  a 
united  whole  and  a  series  of  hostile  fractions.  Britannia  can- 
not at  once  rule  the  seas  and  be  a  member  of  the  League  of 
Nations.  I  am  afraid  that  if  she  were  forced  to  be  logical, 
it  is  not  "  Rule  Britannia  "  that  she  would  cease  to  sing. 

XXXV 

This  sullen  resistance  to  the  League  has  much  in  common 
with  the  super-millennial  refusal  of  Israel  to  universalise  the 
prophetic  teaching  and  be  absorbed  in  its  diffusion.  It  has 
been  suggested  by  a  writer  ignorant  of  human  nature  that  if 
Arius  had  conquered  at  the  Council  of  Nicasa,  the  Jews  would 
have  joined  the  Church.  But  there  is  a  national  will-to-live  — 
that  in  the  greater  nations  is  also  a  will-to-dominate  —  which 
feels  itself  jeopardised  by  entering  into  a  world-combination. 
In  vain  Paul  cried :  "  There  shall  be  neither  Jew  nor  Greek." 
In  vain  the  followers  of  Philo  pressed  for  the  practical  conse- 
quences of  his  universal  doctrine.  Even  the  League  of  Nations 
proposes  to  respect  the  individual  nationalities  whose  federation 
is  to  constitute  it.  But  the  mere  fact  that  "  Sovereign  rights  " 
are  to  be  as  restricted  by  the  alliances  of  peace  as  they  always 
are  by  the  alliances  of  war,  is  sufficient  to  set  the  quills  of  Na- 
tionality bristling  and  the  nostrils  of  Imperialism  snorting. 
As  if  "  Sovereign  rights  "  were  in  any  case  unrestricted !  As 
if  they  were  something  absolute  and  antinomian,  immune  from 
the  claims  of  reason  or  justice!  As  if  the  truer  majesty  were 
not  in  humble  obedience  to  Love  and  Law!  Even  Robinson 
Crusoe  on  his  island  had  no  right  to  be  cruel  to  its  animal  life. 

133 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

Diderot,  in  his  article  on  Society  in  the  Encyclopaedia,  recalls 
how  when  some  one  said  before  Antigonus,  the  King  of  Syria, 
that  princes  were  the  masters,  and  that  everything  was  per- 
mitted to  them,  he  replied :  "  Yes,  among  barbarians :  as  for 
us,  we  are  masters  of  the  things  prescribed  by  reason  and  hu- 
manity;  but  nothing  is  permitted  to  us  but  what  is  conform- 
able to  justice  and  duty." 

It  is  true  that  despite  the  League  of  Damnations,  Tennyson's 
vision  seems  on  the  way  to  realisation.  There  is  the  progres- 
sive deadliness  of  war,  there  are  the  horrible  new  inventions 
waiting  to  be  launched ;  inventions  which  have  caused  all  the 
leading  politicians  of  England  to  join  their  signatures  in  a 
frantic  appeal  to  the  public  to  —  contribute  a  million  pounds 
to  the  propaganda  of  the  League !  A  monumental  anti-climax, 
indeed.  If  the  destruction  of  civilisation  is  thus  seriously 
looming,  surely  these  politicians  have  it  in  their  own  hands  to 
make  a  true  League  of  Nations,  not  to  mention  vote  a  million 
for  it  in  their  Parliament !  The  million  would  then  be  saved 
a  hundred  times  over  in  armaments. 

Fatuous,  however,  as  is  the  statesmanship  of  our  politicians, 
it  is  possible  that  the  unbearable  agonies  and  wholesale  de- 
structiveness  of  scientific  warfare  may  give  humanity  pause. 

"  Nothing  happens  to  any  man,"  said  Marcus  Aurelius, 
"  which  he  was  not  formed  by  Nature  to  bear."  The  excellent 
Emperor  was  mistaken.  So  far,  indeed,  as  Nature  proper  is 
concerned,  his  apophthegm  is  an  axiom,  for  a  species  which 
could  not  endure  its  environment  would  be  eliminated.  But  the 
imperial  philosopher  overlooked  the  happenings  which  man  — 
in  his  scientific  insanity  —  brings  upon  himself.  Neither  man 
nor  any  other  creature  has  been  formed  to  bear  the  artificial 
horrors  which  are  man's  creative  additions  to  the  cruelties  of 
Nature. 

"  Man  marks  the  earth  with  ruin  —  his  control 
Stops  with  the  shore;  upon  the  watery  plain 
The  wrecks  are  all  thy  deed." 

So  wrote  Byron  in  his  famous  apostrophe  to  the  Ocean.  He 
did  not  foresee  the  submarine.  Savage  tooth  and  claw,  light- 
nings and  foul  vapours,  cyclones  and  volcanic  jets  —  what  en- 
durable milieux  compared  with  myriads  of  mammoth  guns  belch- 
ing and  roaring  pauselessly  for  a  fortnight  at  a  time;  with 
gliding  poison-clouds;  with  projected  flames;  with  swarms  of 

134 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

reeking  putrefying  corpses.     Even  earthquakes  are  less  shat- 
tering than  our  mines. 

It  is  as  if  mankind  was  given  over  to  be  the  sport  of  Pros- 
pero: 

"  Go,  charge  my  goblins  that  they  grind  their  joints 
With  dry  convulsions ;  shorten  up  their  sinews 
With  aged  cramps ;  and  more  pinch-spotted  make  them, 
Than  pard,  or  cat  o'  mountain." 

Prospero  does  indeed  command  the  planet  and  has  shaken 
"  the  strong-based  promontory,"  opened  graves,  "  and  by  the 
spurs  plucked  up  the  pine  and  cedar."  Scant  wonder,  there- 
fore, if  our  poor  sensorium,  evolved  only  for  the  natural  rough- 
and-tumble  of  our  genial  globe,  collapses  in  this  monstrous, 
factitious  hurly-burly. 

The  tragic  absurdity  of  man  self-swamped  by  the  "  many  in- 
ventions "  he  has  "  sought  out  "  may,  as  I  said,  finally  dawn 
upon  him ;  but  if  he  is  moved  thereby  to  a  League  against  war, 
it  will  not  be  for  the  noblest  reason.  Man  should  be  moved  not 
by  what  he  must  suffer,  but  by  what  he  must  inflict.  The  use  of 
such  weapons  is  an  attainder  to  his  own  spiritual  dignity,  it  is 
high  treason  to  the  majesty  of  man. 

To  the  ignoble  deterrents  of  war  should  be  added  the  fear  of 
bankruptcy  which  is  the  beginning  of  wisdom,  the  epidemics 
which  war  leaves  in  its  trail,  and  which  know  no  frontiers,  not 
even  those  of  neutrals ;  the  scarcity  of  food  and  raw  material 
which  it  leaves  prevalent  over  large  areas,  the  derangement  of 
trade  and  commerce  resulting  from  the  erratic  exchange  under 
which  some  countries  cannot  afford  to  buy  and  others  to  sell, 
and  the  social  unrest  arising  from  all  these  factors  and  from 
widely-diffused  bereavement  and  lamentation. 

But  all  these  negatives  are  forgotten  in  the  hot-blooded  af- 
firmative of  a  new  war-cry,  and  unless  we  can  rely  on  Labour 
grown  conscious  at  last  of  its  power  and  duty,  a  more  sub- 
stantial hope  and  one  less  sordidly  grounded  lies  in  the  posi- 
tive development  of  air-travel  in  the  years  of  Peace.  In  de- 
veloping this,  Lord  Northcliffe  is  his  own  best  counteractive. 

Rudyard  Kipling,  in  his  marvellous  story,  "  With  the  Night 
Mail,"  reduces  the  "Parliament  of  Man"  to  A.  B.  C.  He 
brings  home  to  us  how  in  the  flying  era  (which  is  already  upon 
us)  the  Aerial  Board  of  Control  —  yclept,  of  course,  the  A. 
B.  C. — "  confirms  or  annuls  all  international  arrangements  " 
and  nothing  may  be  done  that  may  "  interfere  with  the  traffic 

135 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

and  all  it  implies."  The  Board  finds  "  our  tolerant,  humor- 
ous, lazy  little  planet  only  too  read}r  to  shift  the  whole  burden 
of  public  administration  on  its  shoulders."  "  Transportation 
is  Civilisation  "  is  the  motto  of  the  age.  Here  speaks  the  in- 
spired seer,  a  Balaam  blessing  Peace,  as  if  despite  himself.  It 
is  not  merely  that  air-travel  will  necessitate  a  world-Board.  Its 
swiftness  will  make  counties  of  countries  and  countries  of  con- 
tinents. It  will  make  frontiers  and  custom-houses  still  more 
ridiculous.  As  Mr.  Wells  has  pointed  out,  "  The  Sovereign 
States  of  Europe  are  too  small  for  modern  aerial  transport." 
But  if  this  network  of  passports  and  custom-houses  is  "  likely 
to  strangle  aviation,"  it  is  State  Sovereignty  which  in  our  prac- 
tical world  is  more  likely  to  be  strangled.  At  present  we  do 
"  interfere  with  the  traffic."  And  it  is  only  by  interference 
that  the  reduction  of  Europe  to  a  unity  is  staved  off.  For 
States  are  the  expression  of  conditions ;  and  the  shrinkage  of 
space  through  aviation  and  "  wireless  "  has  made  these  ancient 
kingdoms  parochial.  By  our  duties  and  passports  we  are  ar- 
tificially bolstering  up  their  crumbling  partitions,  trying  to 
hold  asunder  what  Science  has  brought  together.  The  sooner 
these  rotten  barriers  fall,  the  sooner  we  shall  settle  down  to 
cultivating  our  planet. 

But  humanity  has  not  suffered  enough,  and  doubtless  we  have 
to  undergo  still  grimmer  experiences  before  our  almost  incor- 
rigible hearts  are  chastened,  and  our  gun-deafened  ears  turned 
and  attuned  to  the  still  small  voice  of  Jerusalem. 


136 


THE  POSITION  OF  JUDAISM 

[From  the  North  American  Review,  April,  1895.] 

The  fall  of  the  Ghettos  has  left  Israel  dazed  in  the  sunlight 
of  the  wider  world  without,  his  gaberdine  half  off  and  half  on. 
If  he  throws  it  off,  will  he  throw  off  his  distinctiveness  and  fade 
into  the  common  run  of  men?  If  he  keeps  it  on,  can  he  keep  his 
place  in  the  new  human  brotherhood?  And  as  he  gropes,  ir- 
resolute, he  stumbles  at  every  step  amongst  the  ruins  of  the 
Ghetto  wall  against  a  debris  of  problems  —  not  merely  prob- 
lems of  'doxy  which  the  Zeitgeist  brings  to  him  as  well  as  to 
Christianity,  but  problems  of  racial  integration  and  disintegra- 
tion, problems  of  transformation  of  sociologic  function  as  of 
restoring  the  Jew  to  the  soil,  problems  of  "  ceremonial "  con- 
duct, of  allegiance  to  the  Mosaic  and  Rabbinic  codes,  problems 
of  international  politics,  of  immigrations  and  persecutions  and 
Palestine-restorations,  problems  of  patriotism,  of  fidelity  to  a 
universal  Jewish  citizenship,  so  jealous  and  exacting  that  it 
would  even  forbid  intermarriage  with  the  citizens  of  another 
country ;  and  all  these  problems  are  complicated  by  problems  of 
compromise  between  the  ideal  and  the  practical.  For  the  Jew 
belongs  to  a  race  as  well  as  to  a  religion,  and  may  wish  to  re- 
main in  either,  or  both,  or  neither.  A  Jewish  Robert  Elsmere 
would  have  settled  but  the  least  of  his  problems  when  he  de- 
cided to  abandon  the  orthodox  creed. 

With  these  internal  problems  it  is  impossible  to  grapple  here. 
They  will  probably  be  settled  less  by  reason  than  by  that  large 
drift  of  things  which  lies  outside  the  individual  consciousness. 
I  can  only  venture  to  suggest  a  few  thoughts  concerning  the 
common  Judaism  which  underlies  all  the  j  arring  factions  and  to 
view  this  essential  Judaism  broadly  in  the  light  of  history. 

Modern  philosophy,  which  began  with  Descartes,  still  suffers 
from  the  static  introspection  of  the  Cartesian  method.  We  are 
not  so  thrown  upon  our  own  resources ;  the  Ego  is  not  our  only 
torch.  Even  if  to  begin  de  novo  were  possible  —  even  if  the 
past  did  not  think  through  us  —  it  would  be  foolish  to  neglect 
consciously  what  light  the  past  throws  upon  the  meaning  and 
purpose  of  life.  In  a  philosophy  of  history  —  a  pressing  need 
of  the  times,  that  is  not  altogether  satisfied  by  the  conception 

137 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

of  evolution  —  Judaism  would  be  what  Bacon  calls  an  ostensive 
or  light-giving  instance,  in  which  normal  traits  usually  obscure 
are  accentuated  so  as  to  allow  of  facile  observation.  If  the 
clue  to  the  process  of  the  suns  is  not  to  be  picked  up  in  the 
Ghetto,  I  know  no  more  promising  quarter  in  which  to  seek  it. 
If  the  history  of  Israel  which  touches  all  recorded  time  has  no 
dynamic  significance,  supplies  no  hint  as  to  the  destiny  of  hu- 
manity, then  is  Life  indeed  "  a  walking  shadow,"  and  history  "  a 
tale  told  by  an  idiot,  full  of  sound  and  fury,  signifying  noth- 
ing." 

For  the  story  of  this  little  sect  —  the  most  remarkable  sur- 
vival of  the  fittest  known  to  humanity  —  in  no  way  corresponds 
with  its  numbers;  it  is  not  a  tale  of  majorities.  It  is  a  story 
that  begins  very  near  the  beginning  of  history,  and  shows  little 
sign  of  drawing  to  a  conclusion.  It  is  a  story  that  has  chap- 
ters in  every  country  on  earth,  and  which  has  borne  the  im- 
press of  every  period.  It  ranges  from  the  highest  tragedy  to 
the  lowest  farce;  veritably  Shakespearian  in  its  jostling  of 
princes  and  scholars  and  clowns,  rogues  and  heroes  and  sages. 
All  men  and  all  ages  pass  through  it  in  unending  procession,  the 
stern  warriors  of  the  ancient  world,  the  rotund  burghers  of  the 
mediaeval,  the  prosaic  citizens  of  the  modern,  and  the  toe  of 
Shylock  comes  so  near  the  heel  of  Hamlet,  he  galls  his  kibe. 
But,  picturesque  as  the  story  is  outwardly,  it  is  mainly  by  its 
inner  religious  content  that  it  claims  consideration.  For  to 
the  Jew  the  world  owes  its  vision  of  God. 

The  religion  of  a  race  is  its  vision  of  the  Good,  even  as  its 
science  is  its  vision  of  the  True,  and  its  art  its  vision  of  the 
Beautiful.  Israel's  vision  of  the  Good  was  God ;  and  to  his  uni- 
fying instinct  the  True  and  the  Beautiful  had  no  separate  exist- 
ence. Abraham  —  the  father  of  Israel's  race  —  was  the  first 
to  conceive  the  moral  God,  nay,  to  impose  his  individual  vision 
of  righteousness  upon  his  God. 

"  But  Abraham  stood  yet  before  the  Lord.  And  Abraham  drew 
near  and  said,  Wilt  Thou  also  destroy  the  righteous  with  the  wicked? 
.  .  .  That  be  far  from  Thee  to  do  after  this  manner,  to  slay  the 
righteous  with  the  wicked:  and  that  the  righteous  should  he  as  the 
wicked,  that  be  far  from  Thee.  Shall  not  the  Judge  of  all  the  earth 
do  right?  " 

And  Abraham's  seed  perpetuated  this  faith  in  a  righteous 
God  who  was  revealed  in  Israel.  That  oft-quoted  saying  of 
Jehuda    Halevi,    "  Israel   is   among   the   nations    as    the   heart 

138 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

among  the  limbs,"  will  be  truest  if  interpreted  in  that  meta- 
phorical sense  which  makes  the  heart  the  seat  of  emotion.  For 
it  is  the  heart  that  sees  God.  The  righteous  God  is  an  intui- 
tion, which,  even  if  it  does  not  contradict  experience,  is  not 
reached  by  it.  Israel  first  had  this  conception  of  the  Creator 
and  of  His  relation  to  a  phophet-race  and  through  it  to  the 
world.  It  is  a  unique  ethical  and  political  conception;  there  is 
no  parallel  to  it,  nor  to  the  documents  that  enshrined  it,  nor  to 
the  race  that  incarnated  it.  The  chronicle  of  Israel  is  a  record 
of  backslidings  and  castigation,  a  religious  epic  whose  incidents 
only  serve  to  point  morals,  and  its  mightiest  heroes  are  weak 
and  sinful.  And  this  conception  found  material  realisation  in 
a  moralised  state-system:  in  a  theocracy  to  which  nothing  hu- 
man was  alien,  so  that  sanitation  was  as  much  a  part  of  relig- 
ion as  sacrifice ;  in  a  worship  of  Justice  and  Mercy ;  in  an  unfal- 
tering adoration  of  Right  before  Might  that  was  a  paradox  in 
a  Pagan  world ;  in  a  brotherhood  of  Israel  which  was  to  be  the 
nucleus  of  the  brotherhood  of  man.  Israel  planned  righteous- 
ness as  Sparta  planned  hardihood,  or  Rome  conquest,  or  China 
self-conservation ;  it  was  to  be  a  people  consecrate  to  consecra- 
tion; through  its  sanctity  the  world  was  to  be  sanctified.  Of 
all  the  ideals  that  nations  have  produced,  nothing  more  noble, 
more  Quixotic,  can  be  conceived  than  this  national  idea  of  self- 
perfection  as  an  instrument  for  the  perfection  of  the  world; 
and  if,  on  the  whole,  Sancho  Panza  has  been  as  much  in  evidence 
as  Don  Quixote,  that  is  the  inevitable  tragi-comedy  of  human 
existence.  To  think  of  the  course  of  Jewish  history  is  to  stir 
those  thoughts  that  lie  too  deep  for  tears. 

Among  this  little  people  Christ  was  born;  and  His  teaching, 
more  or  less  transformed  and  for  a  century  and  a  half  not 
clearly  distinguished  from  Judaism  by  the  Pagan  world,  was 
propagated  by  Jewish  apostles  in  Egypt,  Rome,  and  Syria, 
and,  soon  conquering  the  conquerors  of  the  world,  begat  the 
Greek  Church  and  ultimately  the  Roman  and  the  Protestant 
Churches  —  this  last  Church  a  product  of  Christianity  crossed 
again  by  the  Old  Testament,  and  in  England  in  particular  gen- 
erating so  Hebrew  a  type  of  character  that  at  this  day  the  Eng- 
lishman is  regarded  throughout  the  Continent  as  the  Pharisee 
of  Europe.  As  a  coloniser,  as  a  "  mother  of  nations,"  Eng- 
land smacks  more  of  Phoenicia  than  of  Rome,  and  in  the 
making  of  Englands,  Old  and  New,  the  Old  Testament  has 
counted  for  more  than  the  New.  Nine  centuries  earlier,  this 
same  wonderful  Book,  das  Tagebuch  Jehovahs,  as  Heine  calls 

139 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

it,  had  inspired  in  Mohammedanism  a  far  more  potent  and  per- 
vasive  creed.  Through  Christianity  and  Islam,  the  moral  im- 
pulse of  Judaism  was  communicated  through  the  greater  part 
of  the  civilised  world,  and  each  of  these  great  religions  has  sent 
out  missionaries  even  to  those  polytheistic  savage  races  which 
have  remained  outside  the  great  currents  of  history.  In  the 
very  year  that  the  Jews  were  expelled  from  Spain,  a  Spaniard 
won  a  new  world  —  America  —  for  the  Jewish  Bible.  And 
from  century  to  century,  even  unto  this  day,  through  the  fairest 
regions  of  civilisation,  the  Bible,  written  entirely  by  Jews,  dom- 
inates existence ;  its  vision  of  life  moulds  states  and  societies,  its 
texts  confront  us  on  every  hand,  it  is  an  inexhaustible  treasury 
of  themes  for  music  and  pictures.  Its  psalms  are  more  pop- 
ular in  every  country  than  the  poems  of  the  nation's  own  poets. 
Beside  this  one  book  with  its  infinite  editions,  with  all  the  good 
and  ill  it  has  done,  all  other  national  literatures  seem  "  trifles 
light  as  air."  Jerusalem,  as  Renan  points  out,  is  truly  "  a 
house  of  prayer  for  all  nations."  Equally  venerated  by  the 
Jew,  the  Christian  and  the  Mussulman,  she  is  the  Holy  City  of 
half  mankind. 

But  while  Christianity  and  Mohammedanism  were  thus  do- 
ing Israel's  work,  what  was  Israel  doing? 

Israel  was  become  a  Protestant  nation.  The  original  Cath- 
olic Church  of  Humanity  was  gradually  made  to  appear  Prot- 
estant by  the  growth  of  a  majority  permeated  by  a  belief  in 
the  divinity  of  Christ.  Gradually  there  had  been  evolved  the 
touching  but  confusing  conception  of  the  Man-God  of  Sorrows, 
taking  on  human  attributes  to  bridge  the  gulf  between  Infinity 
and  Humanity  and  atoning  by  His  death  for  the  sin  in  which 
He  had  caused  humanity  to  be  born.  To  speak  of  the  Jews  re- 
jecting Christ  when  it  was  the  Jews  who  spread  His  gospel  is  a 
strange,  popular  blunder ;  but  the  bulk  of  the  community  did  re- 
main blind  to  whatever  was  edifying  in  the  new  conception,  by 
whatsoever  divine  or  mythopoetic  process  it  arose.  The  loft- 
iest sayings  of  Christ  were  familiar  to  the  Jews  in  the  Rabbinic 
lore  or  in  their  old  Testament,  and  though  these  dicta  had  never 
before  been  so  fused  as  the  expression  of  a  personality,  yet,  on 
the  other  hand,  Israel  was  not  unaccustomed  to  pseudo-Mes- 
siahs, both  before  and  after  Christ ;  moreover,  the  mysteries  of 
the  Incarnation  and  Atonement  were  in  direct  opposition  to  the 
spirit  of  Judaism  (as  they  seem  a  needless  complication  of  the 
essence  of  Christianity),  and  by  abolishing  the  authority  of  the 

140 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ritual  law,  Christ  disturbed  the  sociological  conception  which  is 
at  the  bottom  of  practical  Judaism. 

The  course  of  Christian  history  did  not  tend  to  reconcile 
Israel  to  Christian  conceptions.  For  Christianity,  after 
emerging  from  a  period  of  persecution,  turned  persecutor, 
avenging  upon  Judaism  Christ's  voluntary  death  for  the  re- 
demption of  the  world,  and  thus  indurated  Israel  in  its  negative 
attitude.  The  development  of  Judaism  went  on  side  by  side 
with  that  of  Christianity,  for  no  religion  has  ever  remained  at 
rest,  except  in  the  eyes  of  its  followers  ignorant  of  its  history. 
Movement  is  at  once  both  the  law  and  the  test  of  life,  though  in 
every  religion  ossification  has  curiously  been  considered  "  or- 
thodoxy." The  orthodox  members  of  a  creed  are  those  who 
preserve  the  organism  in  which  the  change  is  being  effected,  and 
who  constitute  the  hostile  environment  in  which  new  ideas  and 
ideals  have  to  struggle  for  existence.  Judaism,  which  by  the 
ignorant  Jew,  no  less  than  by  the  ignorant  Christian,  is  sup- 
posed to  have  remained  stereotyped  since  Christ,  not  to  say 
since  the  last  page  of  the  Old  Testament,  has  really  been  a  liv- 
ing activity  that  has  manifested  its  inner  vitality  in  many 
shapes  and  forms ;  and,  as  Dr.  Schechter  of  Cambridge  has 
shown  in  his  brilliant  epoch-making  lectures  on  "  Rabbinic 
Theology  "  and  on  "  Jewish  Philosophers  and  Mystics,"  in- 
stead of  being  merely  a  negative  religion,  the  essence  of  which 
was  unbelief  in  Christ  and  the  rejection  of  pork,  it  has  pro- 
duced legends  and  liturgies,  sects  and  movements  and  Messiahs, 
poems  and  philosophies  and  ideals,  and  even  new  Cabbalistic  or 
humanised  conceptions  of  the  Godhead.  But  all  this  has  been 
purely  internal,  and  only  part  of  it  has  been  development. 

Since  the  rise  of  Islam,  Judaism  has  had  no  direct  influence 
upon  the  outside  world.  With  perhaps  the  solitary  exception 
of  fostering,  through  its  distinctively  religious  thinkers,  the 
scholastic  philosophy  of  the  latter  part  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
Judaism  has  been  dead  to  the  world  for  over  a  thousand  years. 
Speaking  broadly,  if  Christianity  had  succeeded  in  eliminating1 
the  Jews,  the  religious  history  of  Europe  would  have  been  the 
same  as  to-day.  And  not  only  has  Judaism  been  dead  to  the 
world,  for  long,  wretched  periods  it  has  been  dead  to  itself;  it 
has  remained  stereotyped,  immobile.  Between  the  fifteenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries  lie  the  Dark  Ages  of  Judaism.  But  the 
miracle  is  that  Judaism  kept  any  spark  at  all  —  for  these  were 
the  Ghetto  Ages  par  excellence,  the  days  of  the  yellow  badge 

141 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

and  the  Dominican  whip,  "  and  the  summons  to  Christian  fel- 
lowship." It  was  life  enough  to  have  retained  suspended  ani- 
mation. Israel  has  had  to  run  the  gauntlet  of  the  world, 
every  man's  hand  against  his,  and  his  against  no  man's,  and 
to  repeat  as  a  race  the  martyrdom  of  Christ  as  an  individual. 
But  what,  nevertheless,  becomes  of  the  mission  of  Israel? 
How  are  we  to  reconcile  the  conception  of  a  nation  destined  to 
be  "  God's  witnesses  "  among  the  heathen,  with  a  thousand 
years  of  unobtrusive  stagnation  ?  Well,  "  they  also  serve  who 
only  stand  and  wait."  The  mills  of  God  grind  slowly:  in  the 
eyes  of  the  Eternal,  as  in  the  eyes  of  the  apostles  of  evolution, 
"  a  thousand  years  are  but  as  a  day."  And,  in  a  sense,  the 
mere  obstinate  survival  of  Israel  may  still  be  deemed  a  witness 
to  "  the  finger  of  God."  Moreover,  the  Jewish  idea  of  a  "  mis- 
sion "  is  not  of  that  fussy  activity,  as  of  Mrs.  Jellyby,  which 
Christianity  connects  with  the  word ;  of  imposing  verbal  beliefs 
upon  savages,  whose  vision  of  life  is  quite  other.  It  is,  in  fact, 
the  Rabbi's  duty  to  dissuade  the  would-be  proselyte.  One  may 
influence  one's  time  by  simply  being:  each  righteous  soul  is  a 
radiation  of  good.  And  the  "  saving  of  worlds  "  is  not  per- 
haps best  effected  by  noisy  propagandism.  The  merit  of  stay- 
ing at  home  is  eloquently  expounded  by  Carlyle.  The  rabbis 
had  a  pregnant  saying :  "  It  is  not  thy  business  to  complete  the 
work,  but  neither  hast  thou  the  right  to  neglect  it."  To  do 
one's  own  work  well  —  that  is  the  wisdom  of  the  ages.  And 
so,  though  Judaism  was  temporarily  self-centred,  it  is  not  noth- 
ing for  it  to  have  consoled  and  uplifted  a  hundred  generations, 
to  have  made  life  livable  even  in  Ghettos.  Judaism  achieved 
sufficient  triumph  in  surviving  at  all.  To  have  actively  propa- 
gated its  negative  doctrine  of  disbelief  in  Christ  would  have 
been  to  court  annihilation.  Jews  did  not  indeed  shrink  from 
disputing  theses  with  Christians  in  those  mediaeval  tournaments 
of  theology,  but  we  know  that  they  never  carried  off  the  vic- 
tory. Such  proselytes  as  they  did  make  were  burnt.  One  Jew, 
Solomon  Molcho,  whose  family  still  survives  in  the  Orient,  set 
out,  greatly  daring,  to  convert  the  Pope.  The  Pope  was  stiff- 
necked  but  urbane,  and  it  was  not  till  Solomon  broached  Juda- 
ism to  Charles  V.  that  the  poor  missionary  was  consumed  by  fire. 
Yes,  it  is  enough  that  Israel  has  survived,  battered  it  may  be, 
and  stained  with  shame  and  pusillanimity ;  warped  by  evil 
growths  of  cunning  and  covetousness  developed  in  the  struggle 
with  superior  forces ;  distorted  not  infrequently  by  the  perverse 
action  of  a  religion  that  lent  itself  too  easily  to  formalism; 

142 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

here  and  there,  too,  materialised  and  vulgarised  by  the  sudden 
sun  of  prosperity ;  but  strong*  by  force  of  standing  alone,  ten- 
acious, energetic,  soberly  adventurous,  brilliantly  intellectual, 
spiritual  and  idealistic  in  certain  directions,  domestic,  civic, 
patriotic,  infinitely  adaptable,  a  marvellous  reservoir  of  intellect 
and  emotion  and  will  and  sanity,  sufficient  to  renovate  a  deca- 
dent civilisation.  The  vices  of  Israel  are  on  the  surface,  his 
virtues  lie  deep.  In  the  language  of  Galton,  he  is  a  "  grade  " 
or  two  above  normal  humanity. 

But  this  admission  of  a  thousand  years  of  non-influence  re- 
quires an  important  modification.  It  is  only  as  a  religious  or- 
ganisation that  Israel  has  remained  barren;  as  a  race  it  has 
played  a  very  considerable  role  in  history,  both  in  the  gross  and 
through  the  individual.  Judaism  may  have  stood  still,  but 
Israel  never.  As  a  body,  Jews  were  the  great  agents  of  the 
Middle  Ages  —  the  wandering  Jews,  a  human  network  of  inter- 
communication. They  carried  literature  and  folk-lore;  they 
brought  science  from  Arabia  to  Europe  by  way  of  Spain ;  they 
invented  the  mechanism  of  commercial  exchange,  and,  less  cred- 
itably, were  the  chief  slave-dealers.  Mediaeval  Israel  was 
mainly  an  intermediary. 

It  is  only  through  isolated  individuals  that  Israel  has  influ- 
enced the  world  at  first  hand.  Through  Spinoza  it  affected  the 
whole  course  of  modern  philosophy ;  through  Ricardo  it  founded 
political  economy;  through  Karl  Marx  and  Lassalle  it  created 
socialism ;  through  its  financiers  and  politicians  it  has  time  and 
again  shaped  European  politics ;  through  a  host  of  poets,  sci- 
entists, actors,  artists,  musicians  and  journalists  —  of  whom 
longum  est  dicere  —  it  has  been  in  the  van  of  the  world.  To- 
day, in  spite  of  two  thousand  years  of  suppression,  and  though 
but  a  small  fraction  of  the  population  of  the  world,  it  looms 
large  in  the  arts  and  letters  and  Bourses  of  every  capital  of 
civilisation. 

But  now  we  are  confronted  with  the  curious  fact  that  the  indi- 
viduals through  whom  Israel  has  influenced  the  world  have  been 
for  the  most  part  divorced  from  the  body  proper.  They  have 
been  heretics ;  caring  little  or  nothing  about  "  The  Mission  of 
Israel,"  and  not  immediately  concerned  about  Righteousness. 
They  have  been  "  racial,"  not  "  religious,"  Jews,  and  even  their 
race  they  have  sometimes  disavowed.  Even  when,  as  in  Spinoza 
and  Lassalle,  the  spirit  of  the  ancient  Prophets  has  broken  out 
in  them,  they  have  not  consciously  connected  their  moral  fer- 
vour with  the  mission  of  their  race,  nor  recognised  the  signifi- 

143 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

cance  of  their  heredity.  This  is  indeed  a  shining  example  of  the 
irony  of  history,  and  almost  leads  to  the  suspicion  that  the 
function  of  Judaism  during  the  last  thousand  years  has  been  to 
conserve  an  environment  favourable  to  the  production  of  great 
heterodox  Jews.  Jesus  himself  drew  from  the  nursery  of  Juda- 
ism those  ideals  which  enabled  him  to  react  against  their  dis- 
tortion in  practice;  and  from  Talmudical  dialectics  the  Jewish 
mind  derived  the  subtlety  that  expressed  itself  later  through 
mathematicians  and  jurists  and  philosophers  and  chess-players; 
its  talent  for  music  was  fostered  by  the  fondness  for  melodious 
ministers;  by  its  domestic  poetry  and  its  tragic  history  it  ac- 
cumulated the  genius  of  a  Heine,  whose  humour  sprang  from 
that  pervasive  cheerfulness  which  aided  his  race  to  survive,  and 
which  tinged  even  its  theology  with  genial  esprit;  its  adaptabil- 
ity, its  natural  mimicry  of  all  races,  fitted  it  for  triumphs  on 
the  stage,  and  its  enforced  deference  to  its  persecutors  pre- 
pared it  for  comedy ;  to  the  prenatal  power  of  the  orthodox 
code  the  heterodox  celebrities  were  indebted  for  their  health, 
their  head  and  their  heart,  and  from  the  diaspora  and  the  per- 
secution came  their  assertive  individuality  and  their  cosmopol- 
itan standpoint. 

And  while  through  the  stagnation  of  its  masses  and  the  indif- 
ference of  its  energising  units,  Judaism  qua  religion  has  been  a 
waste  force  in  the  world,  by  a  further  irony  of  history  the  bat- 
tle for  Judaism  has  been  fought  by  a  thousand  outsiders.  The 
dogma  which  has  been  the  key-stone  of  Christianity  has  been 
shaken  from  all  sides.  The  divinity  of  Christ  is  practically  all 
that  Judaism  denies,  and  there  is  no  need  to  insist  on  the  nega- 
tive attitude  of  modern  thought  towards  this  primal  conception. 
From  the  ranks  of  Unitarianism,  Theism,  Agnosticism,  and 
Atheism,  the  disbelief  has  definitely  spread  to  Protestantism,  the 
doctors  of  which  are  providing  more  or  less  nebulous  substitutes 
for  the  concrete  Christ  of  the  every-day  Christian.  The  litera- 
ture of  the  day  is  thoroughly  anti-Christian,  the  great  writers 
to  a  man  do  not  believe  in  Christ.  It  is  not  only  the  specifically 
polemical  writers  like  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward,  it  is  the  literary 
class  in  general.  Books  with  distinctively  Christian  teaching 
appeal  only  to  cliques;  the  leading  things  of  general  literature 
are  the  work  of  men  not  Christians.  The  higher  mind  of  the 
world  is  being  fed  from  non-Christian  sources.  The  great 
movement  of  the  modern  mind  is  away  from  the  Trinity.  Of 
the  writers  with  European  reputations,  Tolstoi  alone  maintains 
even  the  ideals  of  Christianity,  and  Tolstoi  is  accounted  mad. 

144 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

In  our  own  literature  alone,  the  most  conservative  of  all 
modern  literatures,  what  trace  of  Trinitarianism  is  there  in 
Browning,  Swinburne,  Tennyson,  Matthew  Arnold,  William 
Morris,  George  Meredith,  George  Eliot,  Carlyle,  Emerson, 
Hawthorne,  Whitman,  Lowell,  Holmes,  Rudyard  Kipling,  Stev- 
enson, Hardy,  Howells,  Henry  James,  Mill,  Spencer,  Darwin, 
and  a  score  of  others  who  do  the  modern  man's  thinking?  This 
part  of  Christianity  is  crumbling  away  even  while  Judaism  looks 
idly  on.  History  and  science  do  not  corroborate  the  episodes 
on  which  it  is  founded,  and  the  conception  itself  jars  upon  the 
modern  mind.  Its  very  professors  are  vague,  and  even  Mr. 
Gladstone  has  made  heretical  approaches  to  the  Jewish  view  of 
atonement. 

And  while  the  negative  side  of  Judaism  is  thus  being  ap- 
proached by  the  internal  movement  of  Christianity,  so  is  the 
positive  side  of  Judaism  likewise  being  arrived  at  by  the  think- 
ers of  Christendom. 

jBy  the  positive  side  of  Judaism,  I  mean  simply  the  concep- 
tion of  life  which  is  its  essence.  There  is  more  in  Judaism  akin 
to  the  modern  spirit  than  there  is  in  any  other  religion,  for  the 
modern  spirit  is  really  akin  to  that  of  the  Old  Testament.  The 
God  of  the  Old  Testament,  invisible  and  incorporeal  and  incom- 
prehensible, in  whom  is  no  variableness,  neither  shadow  of  turn- 
ing, whose  thoughts  are  not  our  thoughts,  nor  His  ways  our 
ways,  who  visits  the  sins  of  the  fathers  upon  the  children  to  the 
third  and  fourth  generations,  and  who  yet,  on  the  whole,  makes 
for  righteousness  and  happiness,  that  terrible  yet  tender 
Father,  who  is  still  the  God  of  Judaism,  has  more  in  common 
with  the  unity  which  we  apprehend  behind  phenomena  than 
the  god  of  any  other  creed.  The  Mosaic  code,  if  read  to-day 
depolarized,  in  Wendell  Holmes'  phrase,  as  one  would  read  a 
book  by  the  newest  thinker,  would  be  found  —  allowance  being 
made  for  the  circumstance  that  it  is  a  code  for  an  agricultural 
people  —  to  aim  at  all  that  is  best  in  socialism  without  inter- 
fering with  the  free  play  of  individual  activity.  It  is  practical 
sociology,  social  science  applied  to  life  so  as  to  insure  the  moral 
and  physical  well-being  of  the  race.  Only  it  is  sociology  raised 
to  religion,  so  that  obedience  is  rendered,  not  to  cold  hygienic 
laws,  but  to  warm  religious  feeling.  Sociology  will  never  gain 
a  footing  in  the  modern  world  till  it  is  touched  with  emotion, 
and  the  consumptive  lover  will  never  refrain  from  propagating 
himself  unless  kindled  by  a  religious  conception  of  duty  to  the 
race. 

145 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

This  Mosaic  code,  with  its  Rabbinical  Commentaries,  became 
the  nucleus  of  a  poetic  domesticity  that  sweetened  poverty  and 
persecution;  it  made  Israel  cohere  and  be  one  in  a  brotherhood 
of  obedience,  despite  dispersion  to  the  four  corners  of  the 
earth.  This  sanctified  sociology  made  the  sensuous  sacred 
equally  with  the  spiritual.  Judaism  sanctified  the  sensuous, 
Christianity  was  an  abolition  of  the  sensuous.  In  the  result 
Christianity  succeeded  only  in  abolishing  it  from  religion,  not 
from  life.  No  priestly  pitchfork  has  ever  expelled  human  na- 
ture. Christianity  has  fostered  an  unfortunate  dualism  by 
which  part  of  life  has  become  secular,  and  religion,  which  should 
be  the  breath  of  the  whole,  is  set  in  opposition  to  the  material 
framework  of  life.  The  attempt  to  ignore  the  flesh  and  the 
world  must  defeat  itself;  the  flesh  may  be  brought  under  law, 
it  must  not  be  relegated  to  the  Devil.  In  Judaism  even  san- 
itary arrangements  are  part  of  religion.  To  put  away  cer- 
tain sides  of  our  nature,  as  though  God  were  ashamed  of  them, 
is  of  a  piece  with  that  other  dualism  of  "  Science  versus  Re- 
ligion." The  uneasy  dread  with  which  Religion  regards  Sci- 
ence is  really  a  suspicion  that  the  Creator  is  a  dishonest  dealer 
whose  books  will  not  bear  auditing.  Nothing  is  more  typical 
of  the  opposed  Weltanschauung  en  of  Judaism  and  Christianity 
than  their  marriage  services.  In  Christianity,  marriage  is  a 
concession  to  the  weakness  of  the  flesh.  In  Judaism,  it  is  the 
divinely  ordained  method  of  perpetuating  the  race  joyfully  and 
nobly  through  love.  "  Blessed  art  thou,  O  Lord,  who  makest 
the  bridegroom  to  rejoice  with  the  bride."  The  Christian  for- 
mula savours  of  topsy-turveydom.  To  make  the  continuance 
of  the  human  race  merely  a  concession  to  the  weakness  of  the 
human  flesh  is  to  deny  the  divinity  of  life.  Christianity  is  a 
religion  of  death,  of  pessimism,  as  Schopenhauer  saw,  or  at 
least  an  other-worldly  religion.  In  practice,  of  course,  Chris- 
tianity manages  to  run  with  the  hare  and  hunt  with  the  hounds, 
and  the  dualism  of  its  creed  is  paralleled  by  the  dualism  of  its 
code  in  actual  life.  It  is  not  only  in  the  Hegelian  logic  that 
to  be  and  not  to  be  are  the  same.  The  Christians  around  us 
run  contrary  ideals  with  amusing  simultaneity  —  one  code  for 
daily  life,  another  for  Church,  a  lachrymose  liturgy  followed 
by  a  fashionable  parade.  They  eat  their  cake  and  lay  it  up  in 
Heaven  as  well ;  besides  believing  that  it  is  wrong  to  eat  rake 
anywhere,  anyhow.  Religion  is  outside  life,  as  sentiment  is  out- 
side business.  It  is  something  strange  and  esoteric,  like  Greek 
plays  and  the  blessed  word  Mesopotamia. 

146 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

For  Judaism  the  centre  of  gravity  is  here  and  now.  Though 
we  were  immortal,  yet  eternity  is  only  a  succession  of  to-days. 
The  whole  problem  of  life  faces  us  to-day.  Judaism  may  be  a 
selection  from  nature,  a  moral  human  harmony  shaped  by  spir- 
itual genius  upon  the  desolate  chaos  of  nature,  but  Christianity 
is  a  contradiction  of  nature.  Neither  is  verifiable  by  science, 
but  while  Judaism  inspires  life,  Christianity  inspires  to  nega- 
tion of  life ;  valuable  as  a  "  counsel  of  perfection,"  Christian- 
ity can  only  stimulate  chosen  spirits,  making  saints  of  the  few 
and  hypocrites  of  the  many.  C'est  magnifique  mats  ce  ri'est  pas 
la  vie.  Judaism  does  not  despise  the  world,  it  accepts  it,  and 
it  says  grace  not  only  for  food  (as  Charles  Lamb  complained 
Christianity  does  exclusively),  but  for  the  sight  of  forest  and 
ocean.  This  acceptance  of  the  world  is  the  very  note  of  "  mod- 
ernity." Christianity  is  concerned  rather  with  the  failure  and 
inadequacy  of  life.  "  When  the  Devil  fell  sick,  etc."  "  Man's 
extremity  is  God's  opportunity."  Man's  prosperity  should 
rather  be  God's  opportunity.  He  should  be  at  the  root  of  all 
joy  and  all  work.  That  people  should  be  Christians  on  their 
death-bed  is  of  the  very  smallest  use  to  the  world.  Christianity 
is  individual,  Judaism  is  communal.  Israel  confesses  its  sins  in 
common  and  in  public.  Christianity  stimulates  an  unhealthy 
egoism,  a  spiritual  self-torture ;  Judaism  makes  for  a  sane  sanc- 
tity. It  is  not  without  significance  that  Max  Nordau,  the 
author  of  "  Degeneration,"  who  has  raised  the  rallying  cry  of 
sanity  in  the  face  of  a  Europe  given  over  to  morbid  literary 
cults,  should  be  an  Israelite.  Judaism  aims  at  influencing  char- 
acter through  conduct,  Christianity  at  influencing  conduct 
through  emotion.  Judaism  builds  up  the  moral  character  out 
of  moral  acts,  Christianity  thinks  to  get  morality  out  of  spor- 
adic spirituality.  Eight  out  of  the  Ten  Commandments  con- 
cern acts;  only  in  the  tenth  and  last  does  Judaism  exhort  a 
state  of  soul,  "  thou  shalt  not  covet."  The  soul,  built  up  on 
the  basis  of  moral  acts,  becomes  capable  of  moral  states.  If 
Judaism  is  in  danger  of  formalism  and  Pharisaism,  Christianity 
runs  the  risk  of  an  empty  spiritualism.  In  fact,  Christianity 
—  a  negation  of  life  —  has  never  dominated  and  could  not 
ever  really  dominate  life.  It  has  never  expressed  the  Western 
vision  of  the  Good.  It  has  been  external,  not  internal.  The 
average  Christian  is  half  Jew,  half  pagan.  You  cannot  get 
"  the  new  heart  "  of  the  gospels  to  order.  It  must  evolve  from 
within.  The  Mohammedan  missionaries  have  been  more  suc- 
cessful with  savages  than  the  Christian  because  they  offer  a  re- 

147 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ligion  of  acts,  not  impose  a  new  view  of  life.  Souls  cannot  rise 
above  their  level.  It  is  true  that  in  working  through  the  figure 
of  Christ,  Christianity  stands  on  a  basis  of  sound  psychology, 
for  nothing  affects  character  like  character.  But  there  must 
be  already  a  latent  affinity  between  the  two  characters.  There 
is  no  such  thing  as  "  conversion,"  no  sudden  fire,  without  prior 
accumulation  of  inflammable  matter. 

If  I  were  asked  to  sum  up  in  one  broad  generalisation  the 
intellectual  tendency  of  Israel,  I  should  say  that  it  was  a  tend- 
ency to  unification.  The  Unity  of  God,  which  is  the  declara- 
tion of  the  dying  Israelite,  is  but  the  theological  expression  of 
this  tendency.  The  Jewish  mind  runs  to  Unity  by  an  instinct 
as  harmonious  as  the  Greek's  sense  of  Art.  It  is  always  im- 
pelled to  a  synthetic  perception  of  the  whole.  This  is  Israel's 
contribution  to  the  world,  his  vision  of  existence.  There  is 
one  God  who  unifies  the  cosmos,  and  one  creed  to  which  all  the 
world  will  come.  In  science  the  Jewish  instinct,  expressing  it- 
self for  example  through  Spinoza,  seeks  for  "  One  God,  one 
Law,  one  Element  " ;  in  aesthetics  it  identifies  the  True  and  the 
Beautiful  with  the  Good;  in  Politics  it  will  not  divide  Church 
from  State,  nor  secular  history  from  religious,  for  Israel's 
national  joys  and  sorrows  are  at  once  incorporated  in  his  re- 
ligion, giving  rise  to  feasts  and  fasts ;  in  ethics  it  will  not  sun- 
der Soul  from  Body ;  it  will  not  set  this  life  against  the  next, 
this  world  against  another;  even  in  theology  it  will  not  alto- 
gether sunder  God  from  the  humours  of  existence,  from  the 
comedy  which  leavens  the  creation.  Unitas,  unitas,  omnia 
unitas. 

Like  Christianity,  Judaism  has  the  defects  of  its  qualities. 
Its  wisdom  is  the  wisdom  of  age  and  the  ages,  not  the  divine 
discontent  of  youth  —  its  sanity  is  sometimes  overpowering, 
stupefying  —  it  needs  a  touch  of  that  divine  insanity  which 
leads  to  martyrdoms  and  missions,  poems,  and  pictures,  and 
symphonies.  The  young  do  not  understand  it  at  all,  and  its 
ministers  rarely  touch  the  true  chord  of  its  poetry.  Israel  has 
been  noblest  in  suffering ;  Jeshurun,  grown  fat,  kicks.  Despite 
his  crude  conception  of  the  equation  of  merit  and  reward  — 
based  on  the  grosser  texts  of  the  Old  Testament  —  the  Jew 
has  never  shrunk  from  suffering  for  his  faith ;  despite  his  pro- 
verbial astuteness,  in  his  religion  the  Jew  has  made  a  very  bad 
bargain. 

The  wider  conception  of  unjust  suffering  and  misery  which 
runs  through  Ecclesiastes  and  Job,  that  conception  of  "  orig- 

148 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

inal  sin  "  and  vicarious  punishment  which  appears  in  "  The 
fathers  have  eaten  a  sour  grape,  and  the  children's  teeth  are  set 
on  edge,"  must  be  woven  more  conspicuously  into  the  web  of 
Judaism ;  the  doctrine  of  reward  for  virtue  must  needs  be  trans- 
ferred from  the  individual  to  the  race,  as  it  is  already  in  the 
conception  of  a  mutually  responsible  brotherhood.  On  the  side 
of  art,  Judaism  may  not  profitably  widen  itself.  The  latter 
part  of  the  second  commandment,  which  for  long  centuries  com- 
bined with  his  introspective  intellect  to  withdraw  the  Jew  from 
the  plastic  arts,  has  survived  its  function  in  the  world.  There 
will  never  be  again  the  worship  of  image  as  deity ;  though  in  a 
more  subtle  sense  the  worship  of  the  Beautiful  may  replace  the 
worship  of  the  Good.  But  just  as  Christianity  has  not  con- 
quered Judaism,  so  has  Judaism  not  conquered  Paganism,  or 
rather  Hellenism.  But  the  ancient  intensity  of  that  opposi- 
tion of  ideals,  when  each  ideal  had  yet  to  develop  itself,  is  no 
longer  necessary,  and  to-day  their  prismatic  hues  may  blend  in 
the  white  light  of  the  religion  of  the  future,  and  Judaism  may  as 
unhesitatingly  accept  the  Hellenic  cult  of  beauty  as  it  may  com- 
promise with  "  the  Christ  that  is  to  be."  And,  indeed,  the  wor- 
ship of  beauty  may  well  be  incorporated  into  a  religion  which 
already  says  grace  at  first  sight  of  spring  buds  —  grace  for  a 
world  lacking  naught  and  containing  "  goodly  creatures  and 
goodly  trees  to  give  delight  unto  the  children  of  men."  The 
unifying  instinct  of  the  Jew  may  still  identify  the  Beautiful 
with  the  Good ;  but  there  is  no  longer  need  to  dread  the  Grecian 
wisdom  against  which  the  Jewish  poet  of  the  Middle  Ages 
warned  his  brethren;  even  an  infusion  of  the  Greek  scientific 
spirit  would  strengthen  rather  than  impair,  while,  if  Judaism 
remains  sociologic,  the  most  modern  discoveries  in  practical  sci- 
ence might  profitably  be  embodied  in  the  religion,  so  that  cul- 
pably to  endanger  the  public  health  should  be  accounted  "  sin." 
Of  the  trinity  of  ideals,  the  Good  is  the  most  important; 
without  it  life  is  impossible,  corrupt,  distraught.  Israel's  mis- 
sion has  been  the  noblest  of  all,  its  task  the  largest  and  widest ; 
but  its  only  hope  of  influencing  the  future  hinges  on  its  power 
to  absorb  the  culture  of  the  day  so  as  to  bring  its  own  pe- 
culiar contribution  to  the  solution  of  the  problems  of  its  time, 
its  own  moral  vision  of  the  world.  It  must  come  out  of  the 
debris  of  the  Ghetto  and  enrich  humanity  by  its  point  of  view. 
Israel  is  too  apt  to  forget  that  existence  is  not  its  ideal,  patri- 
otic pride  was  not  its  goal;  its  superiority  was  but  to  be  the 
means  to  an  end.     "  In  thee  shall  all  the  families  of  the  earth 

149 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

be  blessed."  The  most  useful  work  Israel  is  doing  at  this  mo- 
ment is  in  the  unnoticed  form  of  colonisation.  Wherever  new 
lands  are  to  be  exploited  there  the  Jew  is  found,  pioneering, 
and  building  up  states.  But  this  function  scarcely  justifies  his 
separate  existence.  Religions  must  live  up  to  themselves  if  they 
are  to  continue  to  exist ;  they  must  be  redeemed  from  the  leaden 
meaninglessness  of  the  commonplace  and  transfused  with  real- 
ity and  vitality.  Their  truths  can  only  be  proved  through  the 
lives  of  their  followers ;  for  religions  are  not  true  in  the  sense  in 
which  scientific  facts  are  true.  They  live  by  what  is  true  in 
the  appeal  of  their  ideals,  and  by  the  organisation  which  they 
provide  to  link  the  generations.  Judaism  needs  to  live  in  its 
own  spirit,  time  to  its  ardent  belief  in  life  —  full-blooded,  man- 
ifold life,  life  that  is  worth  living  now,  or  never.  The  drift  of 
the  higher  spirits  of  the  world  seems  to  be  towards  autonomous 
morality,  with  the  sense  of  sin  superseded.  For  people  refrain 
from  wrong  in  proportion  to  their  power  of  sympathy,  of  im- 
aging the  consequences  to  others.  The  larger  the  heart,  the 
less  the  wrongdoing. 

"  Yes,  what  was  wanting,"  thought  Mr.  Pater's  Marius,  when 
he  saw  the  gladiatorial  brutalities,  "  was  the  heart  that  would 
make  it  impossible  to  witness  all  this ;  and  the  future  would  be 
with  the  forces  that  could  beget  a  heart  like  that." 

This  heart  was  the  Jewish  heart,  and  the  forces  of  the  future 
are  still  with  it. 

To  such  a  creed  as  Judaism  the  verbal  authenticity  of  its 
sacred  book  is  a  triviality ;  to  such  an  organisation  as  Israel 
even  the  fall  of  theism  would  not  be  necessarily  fatal,  the  energy 
stored  up  in  it  could  still  be  conserved  and  turned  to  humanity's 
benefit.  But  when  one  thinks  how  this  earliest  of  theistic 
creeds,  this  original  Catholic  Democratic  Church  of  Humanity, 
has  persisted  through  the  ages,  by  which  wonderful  construc- 
tive state-craft  it  has  built  up  a  race  of  which  the  motto  might 
well  be  Sanity,  Unity,  Sanctity,  a  race  of  which  the  lowest  unit 
is  no  forlorn  outcast,  no  atom  in  a  "  submerged  tenth,"  but  an 
equal  member  of  a  great  historic  brotherhood,  a  scion  of  the 
oldest  of  surviving  civilisations,  a  student  of  sacred  books,  a 
lover  of  home  and  peace ;  when  one  remembers  how  he  has  agon- 
ised —  the  great  misunderstood  of  history  —  how  his  "  pesti- 
lent heresy  "  has  been  chastised  and  rebuked  by  Popes  and 
Crusaders,  Inquisitors  and  Missionaries,  how  he  has  remained 
sublimely  protestant,  imperturbable  amid  marvellous  cathe- 
drals   and   all   the   splendid   shows   of   Christendom,    and   how 

150 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

despite  all  and  after  all  he  is  living  to  see  the  world  turning 
slowly  back  to  his  vision  of  life ;  then  one  seems  to  see  "  the  fin- 
ger of  God,"  the  hand  of  the  Master-artist,  behind  the  comedy- 
tragedy  of  existence,  to  believe  that  Israel  is  veritably  a  nation 
with  a  mission,  that  there  is  no  God  but  God  and  Israel  is  his 
prophet ;  not  Moses,  not  Christ,  not  Mohammed,  but  Israel,  the 
race  in  whom  God  was  revealed,  and  if  whose  faith  and  hope  be 
a  dream,  it  were  well  to  abandon  the  search  for  significance  in 
the  futile  and  ephemeral  life  of  man,  and  to  look  forward  hope- 
fully to  the  Messiah  of  the  cosmic  catastrophe. 


DR.  M.  C  BAM/EE, 

M.  D.  (Haro'd.) 
City  Health  Dept. 

LOS  ANGELES.  CALIF. 


151 


SONGS  OF  THE  SYNAGOGUE 

[These  translations,  chosen  from  my  contributions  to  "  The 
Service  of  the  Synagogue/'  by  kind  permission  of  Messrs.  George 
Routledge  and  Sons,  are  designed  to  elucidate  Judaism  by  illustrat- 
ing the  conceptions  that  found  their  way  into  its  orthodox  liturgy, 
not  necessarily  always  the  highest  conceptions  it  has  produced. 
There  is  a  general  approximation  to  the  metre  and  rhymings  of  the 
originals.  The  use  of  rhyme  and  metre,  it  may  be  remarked,  is  a 
comparative  novelty  in  Hebrew.  Rhyme  was  not  introduced  into 
Hebrew  poetry  before  the  seventh  century,  when  it  appears  in  the 
l'ivvutim  of  Yannai.  Milton  calls  rhyme  "that  barbarous  inven- 
tion to  set  off  lame  metre  " ;  but  there  was  not  even  metre  in  Hebrew 
then.  That  was  not  brought  in  till  three  centuries  later  by  Dunash 
ben  Labrat,  a  young  poet  of  Baghdad  origin,  who  probably  picked  it 
up  from  the  Fez  poets.  "  Such  a  thing  hath  hitherto  been  un- 
known in  Israel,"  said  Saadia,  the  great  Gaon  of  Sura,  when  Dun- 
ash  showed  him  Hebrew  jigging  to  Arab  measures.] 

YIGDAL,  THE  RHYME  OF  THE  THIRTEEN 
ARTICLES 

(Attributed  to  Daniel  ben  Judah,  fourteenth  century.) 
{Daily  Service.) 

1.  The  living  God  0  magnify  and  bless, 
Transcending  Time  and  here  eternally. 

2.  One  Being,  yet  unique  in  unity ; 

A  mystery  of  Oneness  measureless. 

3.  Lo  !  form  or  body  He  has  none,  and  man 
No  semblance  of  His  holiness  can  frame. 

4.  Before  Creation's  dawn  He  was  the  same ; 
The  first  to  be,  though  never  He  began. 

5.  He  is  the  world's  and  every  creature's  Lord ; 
His  rule  and  majesty  are  manifest, 

6.  And  through  His  chosen,  glorious  sons  exprest 
In  prophecies  that  through  their  lips  are  poured 

152 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

7.  Yet  never  like  to  Moses  rose  a  seer, 
Permitted  glimpse  behind  the  veil  divine. 

8.  This  faithful  prince  of  God's  prophetic  line 
Received  the  Law  of  Truth  for  Israel's  ear. 

9.  The  Law  God  gave  He  never  will  amend, 
Nor  ever  by  another  Law  replace. 

10.  Our  secret  things  are  spread  before  His  face; 
In  all  beginnings  He  beholds  the  end. 

11.  The  saint's  reward  He  measures  to  his  meed; 
The  sinner  reaps  the  harvest  of  his  ways. 

12.  Messiah  He  will  send  at  end  of  days, 
And  all  the  faithful  to  salvation  lead. 

13.  God  will  the  dead  again  to  life  restore 
In  His  abundance  of  almighty  love. 

Then  blessed  be  His  name,  all  names  above, 
And  let  His  praise  resound  for  evermore. 

HIGHEST  DIVINITY 

(Anonymous,  mediaeval.) 
(New  Year  Service.) 

Highest  divinity, 
Throned  in  the  firmament, 
Potentate  paramount, 
Hand  superdominant, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Great  in  performing  all, 
Sure  in  decreeing  all, 
Stern  in  unbaring  all, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Speaking  in  holiness, 
153 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Vestured  in  righteousness 
Heedful  of  suppliants, 
Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Saving  the  children  by 
Grace  of  their  ancestors, 
Vexing  their  enemies, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Time  is  His  dwelling-place, 
Goodness  e'erlastingly 
Spanning  the  firmament, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Light  is  His  robe  and  veil, 
Suns,  stars,  have  sprung  from  Him ; 
Potent  and  terrible 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
King  of  the  Universe, 
Piercer  of  mysteries, 
Causing  the  dumb  to  speak, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Propping,  sustaining  all, 
Slaying,  surviving  all, 
Seeing,  unseen  of  all, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Crowned  with  omnipotence, 
Right  hand  victorious, 
Saviour  and  Shelterer, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Round  Him  flame  cherubim, 
Seas  shake  at  word  of  Him, 
154 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Yet  is  His  love  at  call, 
Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Sleeping  nor  slumbering, 
Centre  of  restfulness, 
Awed  angels  chant  His  praise, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 

Lowly  humanity, 
Doomed  to  go  down  to  death, 
Grave-ward  and  lower  still. 
Vain  is  man's  heritage, 

Sovran  of  Vanity ! 

Lowly  humanity, 
Sleep  is  his  daily  end, 
Deep  sleep  his  final  goal. 
Darkness  flows  over  him, 

Sovran  of  Vanity ! 

Highest  divinity, 
Dynast  of  endlessness, 
Timeless  resplendency, 
Worshipped  eternally, 

Lord  of  Infinity ! 


UNDER  THE  YOKE 

(Eleasar  Kalir,  eighth  to  tenth  century.) 

(New  Year  Service.) 

Ah,  why  is  the  Kingdom, 

The  realm  of  glory, 
Cast  out  and  no  longer 

Acclaimed  in  story  ? 

'Twas  Bel  the  dragon, 

The  idol  hollow, 
With  lawless  footsteps 

We  fain  would  follow. 
155 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

The  mistress  of  kingdoms 
Hence  holds  us  lowly, 

Till  shines  renascent 
God's  Kingdom  holy. 

Our  home  in  ashes, 

Our  saints  all  scattered, 

Chaldea  waxeth, 

In  might  unshattered. 

She  bends  her  bowstring, 
Her  yoke  extending ; 

She  rends  the  tender, 
And  reigns  unending. 

Roots  fiercely  plucking, 
Foundations  baring, 

She  planned  in  secret, 
Performed  in  daring. 

She  broke  our  tent-poles, 
Our  curtains  wrested, 

And  drove  the  ploughshare 
Where  once  we  nested. 

She  props  up  princedoms, 
And  realms  sustaineth, 

But  us  she  vexetli, 
But  us  she  paineth. 

Now  swol'n  with  cunning, 
And  guile  sans  leaven, 

In  regal  vesture 
She  soars  to  heaven. 

'Gainst  Thee  rebelleth, 
High  treason  scheming, 

Her  idols  vaunteth, 
Thy  rule  blaspheming. 


Lo  !  us  Thy  children 
She  sorely  tasketh, 
156 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

What  King  o'er  me  is? 
Profanely  asketh. 

And  cries,  usurping 
Thy  sceptre  lonely, 

Save  me  no  King  is, 
I  reign,  I  only. 

Lord,  far  uplifted, 
Hurl  down  her  glory ; 

Once  more  be  sovran 
Of  Israel's  story ! 


THE  LORD  IS  KING 

(Eleasar  Kalir.) 
(New  Year  Service.) 

The  terrible  sons  of  the  mighty  race 

Shout  in  thunder  the  Lord  is  King, 
The  angels  whose  figure  the  lightnings  trace 

Flame  to  the  world  that  the  Lord  was  King, 
And  seraphs  whose  stature  is  one  with  Space 

Proclaim  that  the  Lord  shall  be  King  for  ever. 
The  Lord  is  King,  the  Lord  was  King,  the  Lord  shall  be 
King  for  ever  and  ever. 

The  rushing  and  undulant  sons  of  fire 

Fiercely  cry  that  the  Lord  is  King, 
The  rustling  legions  with  harp  and  lyre 

Sweetly  tell  that  the  Lord  was  King, 
And  numberless   creatures  in   ceaseless   choir 

Chant  that  the  Lord  shall  be  King  for  ever. 
The  Lord  is  King,  the  Lord  was  King,  the  Lord  shall  be 
King  for  ever  and  ever. 

The  bards  who  remember  the  songs  of  yore 

Sing  aloud  that  the  Lord  is  King, 
The  sages  enshrouded  in  mystic  lore 

Find  and  proclaim  that  the  Lord  was  King, 
And  rulers  of  spans  of  the  heavenly  floor 

Cry  that  the  Lord  shall  be  King  for  ever. 
157 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

The  Lord  is  King,  the  Lord  was  King,  the  Lord  shall  be 
King  for  ever  and  ever. 

The  heirs  of  the  To  rah,  Thy  rich  bequest, 

Chant  in  joy  that  the  Lord  is  King, 
The  lordly  warriors  with  crown  and  crest 

Crown  thee,  declaring  the  Lord  was  King, 
And  angels  in  fiery  garments  drest 

Repeat  that  the  Lord  shall  be  King  for  ever. 
The  Lord  is  King,  the  Lord  was  King,  the  Lord  shall  be 
King  for  ever  and  ever. 

Mellifluous  orators  trained  of  tongue 
Preach  and  teach  that  the  Lord  is  King, 

The  shimmering  cherubim,  radiant,  young, 
Trumpet  exultant  the  Lord  was  King, 

And  seraphim  circling  have  ever  sung 

The  song  that  the  Lord  shall  be  King  for  ever. 

The  Lord  is  King,  the  Lord  was  King,  the  Lord  shall  be 
King  for  ever  and  ever. 

Thy  people  in  passionate  worship  cry 

One  to  another  the  Lord  is  King. 
In  awe  of  the  marvels  beneath  the  sky 

Each  explains  that  the  Lord  was  King. 
One  sound  from  Thy  pastures  ascends  on  high : 

The  chant  that  the  Lord  shall  be  King  for  ever. 
The  Lord  is  King,  the  Lord  was  King,  the  Lord  shall  be 
King  for  ever  and  ever. 

Assemblies  of  holiness  consecrate 

Thee  with  the  cry  that  the  Lord  is  King, 

Innumerous  myriads  iterate 

Only  this  —  that  the  Lord  was  King, 

And  flame-flashing  angels  enthroned  in  state 
Echo,  the  Lord  shall  be  King  for  ever. 

The  Lord  is  King,  the  Lord  was  King,  the  Lord  shall  be 
King  for  ever  and  ever. 

The  universe  throbs  with  Thy  pauseless  praise, 

Chorus  eternal,  the  Lord  is  King. 
Thy  glory  is  cried  from  the  dawn  of  days, 

Worshippers  calling  the  Lord  was  King. 
158 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

And  ever  the  Saints  who  shall  witness  Thy  ways 
Shall  cry  that  the  Lord  shall  be  King  for  ever. 
The  Lord  is  King,  the  Lord  was  King,  the  Lord  shall  be 
King  for  ever  and  ever. 

THE  HYMN  OF  GLORY 

(Anonymous,  thirteenth  century.) 
(Eve  of  Atonement  Service.) 

I 

Sweet  hymns  shall  be  my  chant  and  woven  songs 
For  Thou  art  all  for  winch  my  spirit  longs  — 

To  be  within  the  shadow  of  Thy  hand 
And  all  Thy  mystery  to  understand. 

The  while  Thy  glory  is  upon  my  tongue, 
My  inmost  heart  with  love  of  Thee  is  wrung. 

So  though  Thy  mighty  marvels  I  proclaim, 
'Tis  songs  of  love  wherewith  I  greet  Thy  name. 

II 

I  have  not  seen  Thee,  yet  I  tell  Thy  praise, 
Nor  known  Thee,  yet  I  image  forth  Thy  ways. 

For  by  Thy  seers'  and  servants'  mystic  speech 
Thou  didst  Thy  sovran  splendour  darkly  teach. 

And  from  the  grandeur  of  Thy  work  they  drew 
The  measure  of  Thy  inner  greatness,  too. 

They  told  of  Thee,  but  not  as  Thou  must  be, 
Since  from  Thy  work  they  tried  to  body  Thee. 

To  countless  visions  did  their  pictures  run, 
Behold  through  all  the  visions  Thou  art  one. 

Ill 

In  Thee  old  age  and  youth  at  once  were  drawn, 
The  grey  of  eld,  the  flowing  locks  of  dawn, 
159 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

The  ancient  Judge,  the  youthful  Warrior, 
The  Man  of  Battles,  terrible  in  war, 

The  helmet  of  salvation  on  His  head, 

And  by  His  hand  and  arm  the  triumph  led, 

His  head  all  shining  with  the  dew  of  light, 
His  locks  all  dripping  with  the  drops  of  night. 

IV 

I  glorify  Him,  for  He  joys  in  me, 
My  crown  of  beauty  He  shall  ever  be  ! 

His  head  is  like  pure  gold ;  His  forehead's  flame 
Is  graven  glory  of  His  holy  name. 

And  with  that  lovely  diadem  'tis  graced, 
The  coronal  His  people  there  have  placed. 

His  hair  as  on  the  head  of  youth  is  twined, 
In  wealth  of  raven  curls  it  flows  behind. 

His  circlet  is  the  home  of  righteousness ; 
Ah,  may  He  love  His  highest  rapture  less ! 

And  be  His  treasured  people  in  His  hand 
A  diadem  His  kingly  brow  to  band. 

By  Him  they  were  uplifted,  carried,  crowned, 
Thus  honoured  inasmuch  as  precious  found. 

His  glory  is  on  me,  and  mine  on  Him, 
And  when  I  call,  He  is  not  far  or  dim. 

Ruddy  in  red  apparel,  bright  He  glows 

When  He  from  treading  Edom's  wine-press  goes. 

Phylactcried  the  vision  Moses  viewed, 
The  day  He  gazed  on  God's  similitude. 

He  loves  His  folk;  the  meek  will  glorify, 
And,  shrined  in  prayer,  draw  their  rapt  reply. 
160 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


Truth  is  Thy  primal  word ;  at  Thy  behest 
The  generations  pass  —  O  aid  our  quest 

For  Thee,  and  set  my  host  of  songs  on  high, 
And  let  my  psalmody  come  very  nigh. 

My  praises  as  a  coronal  account, 

And  let  my  prayer  as  Thine  incense  mount. 

Deem  precious  unto  Thee  the  poor  man's  song 
As  those  that  to  Thine  altar  did  belong. 

Rise,  O  my  blessing,  to  the  lord  of  birth, 

The  breeding,  quickening,  righteous  force  of  earth. 

Do  Thou  receive  it  with  acceptant  nod, 
My  choicest  incense  offered  to  my  God. 

And  let  my  meditation  grateful  be, 
For  all  my  being  is  athirst  for  Thee. 


LAUS  DEO 

(Meshuixam  ben  Kalonymos,  flourished  at  Rome  or  Lucca 

970.) 

{Bay  of  Atonement  Service.) 

In  the  height  and  the  depth  of  His  burning, 

Where  mighty  He  sits  on  the  throne, 
His  light  He  unveils  and  His  yearning 

To  all  who  revere  Him  alone. 
His  promises  never  are  broken, 

His  greatness  all  measure  exceeds ; 
Then  exalt  Him  who  gives  you  for  token 

His  marvellous  deeds. 

He  marshals  the  planets  unbounded, 

He  numbers  the  infinite  years; 
The  seat  of  His  empire  is  founded 

More  deep  than  the  nethermost  spheres ; 
161 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

He  looks  on  the  lands  from  His  splendour : 
They  tremble  and  quiver  like  reeds ; 

Then  exalt  ye  in  lowly  surrender 
His  marvellous  deeds. 

The  worlds  He  upholds  in  their  flying, 

His  feet  on  the  footstool  of  earth; 
His  word  hath  established  undying 

Whatever  His  word  brought  to  birth. 
The  ruler  of  hosts  is  His  title ; 

Then  exalt  Him  in  worshipful  creeds, 
Declaring  in  solemn  recital 

His  marvellous  deeds. 

He  is  master  of  all  He  created, 

Sublime  in  His  circle  of  light ; 
His  strength  with  His  glory  is  mated, 

His  greatness  at  one  with  His  might. 
So  that  Seraphim  over  Him  winging, 

Obeying  an  angel  that  leads, 
Unite  in  the  rapture  of  singing 

His  marvellous  deeds. 

His  renown  fills  the  heavenly  spaces, 

The  world  He  beholds  to  its  ends. 
His  foes,  who  are  mine,  too,  He  chases ; 

I  count  all  who  love  Him  my  friends. 
Exalted  be  therefore  His  glory, 

His  praises  be  scattered  as  seeds, 
Till  all  the  world  learns  the  great  story, 

His  marvellous  deeds. 

But  of  man  —  ah  !  the  tale  is  another, 

His  counsels  are  evil  and  vain : 
He  dwells  with  deceit  as  a  brother, 

And  the  worm  is  the  close  of  his  reign. 
Into  earth  he  is  carted  and  shovelled, 

And  who  shall  recount  or  who  heeds, 
When  above  earth  he  strutted  or  grovelled, 

His  marvellous  deeds? 

Not  so  God  !  —  earth  on  nothing  He  founded, 
And  on  emptiness  stretched  out  the  skv ; 
162 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

With  land  the  great  waters  He  bounded, 
And  bade  all  their  breeds  multiply. 

In  light  He  is  clad  as  a  raiment, 
His  greatness  no  eulogy  needs ; 

Yet  exalt,  'tis  your  only  repayment, 
His  marvellous  deeds. 


PRAYER  FOR  DEW 

(Eleasak,  Kalie,  eighth  to  tenth  century.) 
(Passover  Service.) 

Dew,  precious  dew,  unto  Thy  land  forlorn ! 
Pour  out  our  blessings  in  Thy  exultation, 
To  strengthen  us  with  ample  wine  and  corn 
And  give  Thy  chosen  city  safe  foundation 
In  dew. 

Dew,  precious  dew,  the  good  year's  crown,  we  wait, 
That  earth  in  pride  and  glory  may  be  fruited, 
And  that  the  city  now  so  desolate 
Into  a  gleaming  crown  may  be  transmuted 
By  dew. 

Dew,  precious  dew,  let  fall  upon  the  land, 
From  heaven's  treasury  be  this  accorded, 
So  shall  the  darkness  by  a  beam  be  spanned, 
The  faithful  of  Thy  vineyard  be  rewarded 
With  dew. 

Dew,  precious  dew,  to  make  the  mountains  sweet, 
The  savour  of  Thy  excellence  recalling  1 
Deliver  us  from  exile,  we  entreat, 
So  we  may  sing  Thy  praises,  softly  falling 
As  dew. 

Dew,  precious  dew,  our  granaries  to  fill, 
And  us  with  youthful  freshness  to  enharden ! 
Beloved  God,  uplift  us  at  Thy  will 
And  make  us  as  a  richly-watered  garden 
With  dew. 
163 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Dew,  precious  dew,  that  we  our  harvest  reap, 
And  guard  our  fatted  flocks  and  herds  from  leanness  J 
Behold  our  people  follows  Thee  like  sheep, 
And  looks  to  Thee  to  give  the  earth  her  greenness 
With  dew. 


THE  REJOICING  OF  THE  LAW 

(Anon.     Time  of  the  Gaonim.) 
(Service  at  end  of  Feast  of  Tabernacles.) 

This  Feast  of  the  Law  all  your  gladness  display, 

To-day  all  your  homages  render. 
What  profit  can  lead  one  so  pleasant  a  way, 

What  jewels  can  vie  with  its  splendour? 
Then  exult  in  the  Law  on  its  festival  day, 

The  Law  is  our  Light  and  Defender. 

My  God  I  will  praise  in  a  jubilant  lay, 

My  hope  in  Him  never  surrender, 
His  glory  proclaim  where  His  chosen  sons  pray, 

My  Rock  all  my  trust  shall  engender. 
Then  exult  in  the  Law  on  its  festival  day, 

The  Law  is  our  Light  and  Defender. 

My  heart  of  Thy  goodness  shall  carol  alway, 

Thy  praises  I  ever  will  render; 
While  breath  is,  my  lips  all  Thy  wonders  shall  say, 

Thy  truth  and  Thy  kindness  so  tender. 
Then  exult  in  the  Law  on  its  festival  day, 

The  Law  is  our  Light  and  Defender. 


THE  ANGELS  CAME 

(Anon.     Time  of  the  Gaonim.) 
(Idem  —  Day  of  Rejoicing  of  the  Law  —  A  Children's  Festival) 

The  Angels  came  a-mustering, 

A-mustering,  a-mustering, 
The  Angels  came  a-clustering 

Around  the  sapphire  throne. 
164 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

A-questioning  of  one  another, 
Of  one  another,  of  one  another, 

A-questioning  each  one  his  brother 
Around  the  sapphire  throne. 

Pray  who  is  he,  and  where  is  he, 
And  where  is  he,  and  where  is  he, 

Whose  shining  casts  —  so  fair  is  he  — 
A  shadow  on  the  throne? 

Pray,  who  has  up  to  heaven  come, 

To  heaven  come,  to  heaven  come, 
Through  all  the  circles  seven  come, 
To  fetch  the  Torah  down? 

'Tis  Moses  up  to  heaven  come, 
To  heaven  come,  to  heaven  come, 

Through  all  the  circles  seven  come, 
To  fetch  the  Torah  down! 


165 


THE  LEGEND  OF  THE  CONQUERING  JEW 


In  July,  1911,  the  First  —  and  so  far  the  last  —  Universal 
Races  Congress  was  held  at  the  University  of  London  under 
the  Presidency  of  Lord  Weardale.  The  list  of  Officers,  Council 
and  supporters  of  that  pioneer  Congress  of  Fraternity,  whose 
emblem  was  a  hand-clasp  between  the  Occident  and  the  Orient, 
and  which  opened  with  a  noble  paper  by  a  Hindoo  completely 
anticipating  President  Wilson's  Gospel,  constitutes  a  roll  of 
the  greatest  political  and  spiritual  figures  throughout  the 
whole  world  at  the  start  of  the  second  decade  of  the  twentieth 
century.  And  that  precisely  this  period  should  have  exhibited 
the  greatest  internecine  struggle  in  human  annals,  with  the 
most  reckless  reversion  to  barbarism  in  its  methods  that  even 
warfare  has  ever  witnessed,  suggests  uncomfortably  that  we 
are  still  at  the  mercy  of  what,  in  the  old  Russia,  they  were  wont 
to  call  "  the  dark  forces." 

But  this  impotency  of  the  rival  forces  of  light  —  due  to 
causes  by  no  means  beyond  analysis  —  does  not  alter  the  fact 
that  the  fine  flower  of  the  civilisation  of  1911  had  arrived  at 
the  stage  of  at  least  desiring  international  and  racial  fraternity, 
without  regard  even  to  the  colour-line.  And  as  though  to  bear 
out  the  view  of  "  the  mission  of  Israel  "  maintained  in  my  con- 
tribution to  the  discussion,  the  Congress  of  Races  was  organised 
by  a  Jew,  and  it  was  a  Jew  —  Dr.  Charles  S.  Myers,  Lecturer 
in  Experimental  Psychology  in  the  Universit}7  of  Cambridge  — 
who  struck  the  clearest  note  of  hope  by  his  well-substantiated 
thesis  that  there  is  no  primitive  people  incapable  of  progress, 
provided  only  the  environment  be  appropriately  changed. 

Yet  at  this  same  Congress  —  and,  by  an  ironic  coincidence, 
in  immediate  sequence  to  my  own  paper  —  a  writer  of  the 
highest  culture  and  the  completest  goodwill,  whose  subject 
moreover  was  "  The  Modern  Conscience,"  put  forward  a  view 
of  Jewish  thought  and  history  which  is  a  startling  proof  of  the 
world's  need  of  the  pages  that  follow,  and  of  such  enlighten- 
ment as  they  are  able  to  convey  on  the  subject  of  Judaism  or 
the  Jews. 

166 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

II 

Sir  Charles  Bruce,  G.C.M.G.,  K.C.M.G.,  J.P.,  D.L.,  had  — 
according  to  Who's  Who  —  been  educated  at  Harrow  and  had 
subsequently  enjoyed  the  illumination  both  of  an  American 
University  and  a  German.  He  had  been  a  Professor  of  San- 
scrit at  King's  College,  London,  when  I  was  a  suckling  in  that 
city,  and  he  had  gone  on  to  the  Directorship  of  Public  Instruc- 
tion in  Ceylon  and  to  a  number  of  other  important  Colonial 
positions,  including  Governorships.  Unlike  the  average  edu- 
cated Englishman  he  could  write  in  German,  and  he  had  con- 
tributed a  work  in  that  language  to  the  Imperial  Academy  of 
St.  Petersburg.  An  Imperialist  of  the  noblest  kind,  really 
believing  in  "  The  White  Man's  Burden,"  he  had  published 
high-minded  books  like  "  The  True  Temper  of  Empire,"  and  a 
volume  of  Poems  had  testified  to  the  generous  effervescence  of 
his  youth.  Yet  this  unprejudiced,  widely-travelled  scholar  and 
thinker  laid  it  down  in  the  paper  that  was  bound  next  to  mine 
in  the  Congress  Book  —  a  paper  marked  moreover  by  a  spacious 
and  sympathetic  outlook  over  all  history,  all  religions,  all 
races  —  that  the  Biblical  stock  from  which  I  come  had  looked 
forward  to  "  a  constantly  multiplied  posterity  which  was  in 
time  to  people  the  world,  and  make  it  the  area  of  a  civilisation 
of  which  they  should  have  the  exclusive  monopoly,"  and  that 
the  means  to  this  monstrous  end  was  "  a  policy  of  extermina- 
tion "  towards  all  other  races. 

As  some  such  grotesque  notion  of  the  ancient  Jews  and  their 
bloodthirsty  Jehovah  is  constantly  cropping  up  (though  in  less 
surprising  environments  than  a  Congress  of  Races),  it  may  be 
worth  while  to  examine  it  in  some  detail,  more  especially  as  it 
shadows  even  the  modern  Jews  in  the  guise  of  a  suspicion,  real 
or  feigned,  that  they  too  cherish  the  dream  of  exterminating 
or  at  least  conquering  the  heathen. 

m 

The  policy  of  conquest  by  extermination,  Sir  Charles  Bruce 
calmly  tells  us,  is  summarised  in  the  notorious  command  trans- 
mitted to  Saul  through  the  prophet  Samuel  to  smite  Amalek 
and  utterly  destroy  "  both  man  and  woman,  infant  and  suckling, 
camel  and  ass."  But  if  the  object  of  this  command  was  to 
make  the  world  safe  for  Judaeocracy,  it  is  not  easy  to  see  why 

167 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

the  valuable  cattle  were  included  in  it.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
the  Jews  sensibly  spared  these  useful  assets,  besides  chivalrously 
saving  King  Agag,  and  though  this  combination  of  the  Sancho 
Panza  and  the  Don  Quixote  cost  Saul  his  Kingdom  at  the  hands 
of  an  avenging  divinity,  yet  the  chastisement  was  merely  for 
disobedience.  There  was  in  fact  no  such  general  policy  of 
extermination.  The  policy  towards  the  Amalekites,  savage 
though  it  was,  was  peculiar  —  it  was  a  unique  historic  vendetta, 
a  long-standing  feud  that  went  back  to  the  first  days  of  the 
Exodus,  when  the  Amalekites  meanly  barred  the  way  to  the 
Jews  coming  up  out  of  the  Egyptian  slavery,  so  that  "  the  Lord 
said  unto  Moses:  Write  this  for  a  memorial  in  the  book  and 
rehearse  it  in  the  ears  of  Joshua,  for  I  will  utterly  blot  out  the 
remembrance  of  Amalek  from  under  heaven."  Thus  the 
nemesis  is  regarded  as  righteous.  And  here  we  have  a  clue  to 
the  reading  of  the  Bible  without  which  the  reader  will  go  astray. 
For,  as  I  have  remarked  in  the  first  essay  of  this  book,  the 
Bible  never  concedes  the  principle  of  modern  Prussian  thinkers 
that  brute  force  qua  force  has  a  legitimate  place  in  the  world. 
This  is  a  valuable  step  upwards,  though  it  may  lead  to  sophis- 
tication of  ancient  records,  and  to  contemporary  hypocrisy. 

Just  as  Kipling  represents  the  white  man's  aggressiveness  as 
his  "  burden,"  so  did  the  writer  of  the  Pentateuch  represent  the 
Jew's  invasion  of  Palestine  as  a  divine  chastisement  of  which 
he  was  the  instrument.  The  difference  between  the  two  glosses 
is  all  in  favour  of  the  Bible  writer,  since  Kipling's  Englishman 
prospers  through  his  own  overflowing  virtues,  while  the  Bible 
Jew  prospers  only  through  his  enemy's  vices.  Thus  the  pop- 
ular assumption  that  the  early  part  of  the  Bible  is  barbarous  is 
mistaken ;  the  elements  with  which  the  sacred  historian  had  to 
deal  were  frequently  savage,  but  they  are  all  seen  refracted 
through  an  elevated  belief  in  the  divine  ordering  of  all  phe- 
nomena. Bolingbroke  defined  history  as  philosophy  teaching 
by  example.      Bible  history  is  religion  teaching  by  example. 

In  such  a  blood-feud  then  as  that  against  the  Amalekites,  in 
which  a  righteous  nemesis  was  supposed  to  demand  the  radical 
elimination  of  the  abhorred  breed,  even  the  cattle  would  be 
accounted  under  the  taint.  But  so  far  from  this  massacre  of 
the  Amalekites  being  part  of  a  policy  of  exterminating  non- 
Jews,  the  very  description  of  it  shows  the  Jews  carefully  spar- 
ing another  tribe.  "  Saul  said  to  the  Kenitcs,  Go,  depart,  get 
ye  down  from  among  the  Amalekites  lest  I  destroy  you  with 
them,  for  ye  showed  kindness  to  all  the  children  of  Israel  when 

168 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

they  came  up  out  of  Egypt.     So  the  Kenites  departed  from 
among  the  Amalekites." 

The  policy  of  destruction  was  indeed  applied  by  the  invaders 
of  Palestine,  and  is  explicitly  enjoined  in  the  twentieth  chapter 
of  Deuteronomy,  but  it  is  carefully  based  on  the  necessity  of 
avoiding  the  contagion  of  the  native  abominations  and,  as  one 
would  expect,  it  was  only  directed  at  those  tribes  who  occupied 
the  actual  area  of  "  The  Promised  Land," —  no  very  great  area 
either.  It  was  not  to  be  applied  at  all  to  external  tribes,  if 
they  surrendered  peacefully,  and  only  to  their  males,  if  they 
insisted  on  putting  the  issue  to  the  sword.  Barbarous  as  is 
this  temper,  beneath  all  the  historian's  sophistication,  its  object 
was  merely  to  find  a  home  for  a  homeless  people,  and  compares 
favourably  with  the  objects  for  which,  even  within  living  mem- 
ory, aborigines  of  more  than  one  now  civilised  land  have  been 
eliminated  by  peoples  already  possessing  vast  portions  of  the 
earth.  As  for  earlier  ages,  consider  the  account  in  Green's 
"  Short  History  of  England  "  of  the  wiping  out  of  the  ancient 
Britons.  "  The  English  conquest  was  a  sheer  dispossession 
and  slaughter  of  the  people  whom  the  English  conquered." 
The  fierceness  of  the  struggle,  the  conquest  only  partially 
carried  out  after  centuries  of  warfare,  remind  one  vividly  of 
the  Jew  in  Palestine,  and  may  be  commended  to  the  cultivators 
of  the  Anglo-Israelite  legend.  When  at  last  the  struggle 
lapsed,  "  Britain,"  writes  Green,  "  had  become  England,  a  land 
that  is  not  of  Britons  but  of  Englishmen.  .  .  .  The  Briton 
had  disappeared  from  the  greater  part  of  the  land  which  had 
been  his  own,  and  the  tongue,  the  religion,  the  laws  of  his 
English  conqueror  reigned  without  a  rival  from  Essex  to  the 
Severn,  and  from  the  British  Channel  to  the  Firth  of  Forth." 
This  was  two  thousand  years  after  Joshua.  Or  let  us  take  a 
period  a  thousand  years  later  still. 

"  The  contact  which  Columbus  established,"  says  Seeley  in  his 
"  Expansion  of  England,"  "  being  the  most  strange  and  violent 
which  ever  took  place  between  two  parts  of  the  human  family,  led  to 
a  fierce  struggle  and  furnished  one  of  the  most  terrible  pages  to 
the  annals  of  the  world.  But  in  this  struggle  there  was  no  sort  of 
equality.  The  American  race  had  no  more  power  of  resisting  the 
European  than  the  sheep  has  of  resisting  the  wolf.  Even  where  it 
was  numerous  and  had  a  settled  polity,  as  in  Peru,  it  could  make 
no  resistance;  its  states  were  crushed,  the  ruling  families  ex- 
tinguished and  the  population  itself  reduced  to  a  form  of  slavery. 
Everywhere,  therefore,  the  country  fell  into  the  hands  of  the  immi- 

169 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

grating  race,  and  was  disposed  of  at  its  pleasure  as  so  much  plun- 
der. The  immigrants  did  not  merely,  as  in  India,  gradually  show 
a  great  military  superiority  to  the  native  race,  so  as  in  the  end  to 
subdue  them,  but  overwhelmed  them  at  once  like  a  party  of  hunters 
suddenly  assailing  a  herd  of  antelopes." 

We  learn  in  fact  from  Prescott's  "  Conquest  of  Peru  "  that 
Pizarro's  conquest  was  a  massacre,  for  the  followers  of  the  Inca 
were  unarmed,  unacquainted  with  the  effects  of  artillery,  and 
even  with  charging  horses.  Moreover  it  was  treachery,  for  the 
Inca  came  to  the  fatal  plaza  as  a  guest  of  his  white  visitors. 
Yet  Pizarro  encouraged  his  followers  with  the  cry  that  heaven 
was  on  their  side  —  his  chieftain,  a  Dominican  friar,  crucifix  in 
hand,  summoned  the  Indian  monarch  to  submission  to  Christ 
and  Charles  V.,  and  after  the  butchery,  the  Christian  conquis- 
tador explained  to  his  royal  prisoner  that  he  and  his  men  had 
come  into  the  country  to  proclaim  the  gospel,  the  religion  of 
Jesus  Christ,  and  that  it  was  no  wonder  they  had  prevailed, 
when  His  shield  was  over  them.  The  day's  proceedings  closed 
with  an  exhortation  to  his  desperados  to  offer  up  thanksgivings 
to  Providence.  This,  as  I  have  said,  was  three  thousand  years 
after  the  Conquest  of  Canaan. 


IV 

The  Old  Testament  would  not  be  the  great  literature  that  it 
is,  did  it  mirror  life  as  less  savage  than  we  know  life  still  to  be. 
And  if  its  Jews  fall  occasionally  almost  to  the  level  of  some  of 
the  races  in  our  recent  war,  their  brutality  is  mitigated  by 
many  a  prescription  which  puts  those  Christian  peoples  to 
shame.  For  a  modern  evolutionary  view  of  the  rise  and 
progress  of  Judaism  from  its  crude  origins,  I  must  refer  the 
reader  to  my  little  book  on  "  Chosen  Peoples."  But  it  may  be 
pointed  out  here  how,  even  in  the  most  primitive  section  of  the 
Bible  and  apart  from  its  general  veneer  of  moralisation,  we 
catch  notes  of  chivalry  and  pity,  to  which  no  inconsiderable 
portion  of  Christian  Europe  is  still  deaf.  Thus  after  the 
countless  rapes  of  conquered  women,  with  which  recent  history 
has  made  us  so  painfully  familiar,  it  is  like  hearing  soft  music 
to  read  in  Deuteronomy  (xxi.  10 — 13)  of  the  warrior's  duty 
to  the  enemy  woman  who  has  aroused  his  lust :  of  the  necessary 
marriage  with  its  set  ritual  and  its  due  delay  before  his  passion 

170 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

could  be  gratified.  Little  enough  of  extermination  here.  Still 
less  of  a  narrow  matrimonial  tribalism.  And  the  Mosaic  legis- 
lator proceeds  to  trace  the  course  of  the  husband's  duty  in  the 
event  of  the  conquered  alien  woman  failing  to  bring  him  the 
expected  delight.  "  Then  thou  shalt  let  her  go  whither  she 
will ;  but  thou  shalt  not  sell  her  at  all  for  money,  thou  shalt  not 
deal  with  her  as  a  slave,  because  thou  hast  humbled  her." 

Dekker  described  Christ  as  "  the  first  true  gentleman  that 
ever  breathed."  It  seems  to  me  that  the  priority  belongs  to 
the  Mosaic  legislator.  In  the  same  vein  are  other  rules  for  the 
conduct  of  war,  the  prohibition  for  example  against  destroying 
the  enemy's  necessary  fruit-trees  — "  for  is  the  tree  of  the  field 
man  that  it  should  be  besieged  of  thee? "  (Deuteronomy 
xx.  19). 

Best  of  all  the  war  regulations  of  this  malignant  Mosaic  code, 
and  of  a  mansuetude  to  which  no  modern  State  has  yet  attained, 
is  that  individuals  of  the  citizen  army  are  to  withdraw  from  the 
approaching  battle.  "  And  the  officers  shall  speak  unto  the 
people,  saying :  *  What  man  is  there  that  hath  built  a  new  house, 
and  hath  not  dedicated  it?  let  him  go  and  return  to  his  house, 
lest  he  die  in  the  battle,  and  another  man  dedicate  it.  And 
what  man  is  there  that  hath  planted  a  vineyard,  and  hath  not 
used  the  fruit  thereof?  let  him  go  and  return  unto  his  house, 
lest  he  die  in  the  battle,  and  another  man  use  the  fruit  thereof. 
And  what  man  is  there  that  hath  betrothed  a  wife,  and  hath 
not  taken  her?  let  him  go  and  return  unto  his  house,  lest  he  die 
in  the  battle,  and  another  man  take  her.'  "  In  the  final  exemp- 
tion, considerateness  is  enforced  by  sagacity :  "  And  the 
officers  shall  speak  further  unto  the  people,  and  they  shall  say : 
'  What  man  is  there  that  is  fearful  and  fainthearted  ?  let  him 
go  and  return  unto  his  house,  lest  his  brethren's  heart  melt  as 
his  heart.'  " 

Here  is  a  shrewd  psychological  understanding  of  the  dan- 
gerous contagion  of  cowardice,  as  well  as  of  its  probable  self- 
conquest  if  given  freedom  of  choice.  The  contagion  of  courage 
would  then  probably  act  upon  the  trembler,  and  the  fear  of 
confessing  himself  faint-hearted  might  nerve  him  to  bravery. 
Compare  this  genial  wisdom  with  the  grim  "  Shot  at  dawn  "  of 
contemporary  military  law;  with  that  stark  brutality  of  the 
ritual  of  Moloch  which  has  sent  shell-shocked  conscripts  in 
their  teens  to  a  dishonoured  grave.  The  Jewish  law,  at  once 
more  merciful  and  more  intelligent,  tended  to  produce  a  state 
of  soul  in  the  ranks  resembling  that  of  our  first  volunteers  to 

171 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

avenge  Belgium.  It  is  the  combination  of  universal  service 
with  freedom. 

A  people  that  could  thus,  thirty-five  centuries  ago,  make 
militarism  its  slave  and  not  its  master,  might  well  flatter  itself 
that  the  Lord  was  with  it.  And  even  though  it  anticipated 
modern  Europe  in  covering  the  ruthless  dispossession  of  its  foes 
by  the  plea  of  their  abominable  practices,  it  had  the  saving 
grace  to  tell  itself:  "Not  for  thy  righteousness  or  for  the 
uprightness  of  thy  heart,  dost  thou  go  in  to  possess  their  land; 
but  for  the  wickedness  of  these  nations  the  Lord  thy  God  doth 
drive  them  out  from  before  thee.  .  .  .  For  thou  art  a  stiff- 
necked  people  "  (Deuteronomy  ix.  5,  6). 

Moreover,  despite  the  narrative  in  the  fifteenth  chapter  of 
Samuel,  even  the  Amalekites  were  not  really  extirpated,  as  we 
learn  incidentally  from  the  twenty-seventh  chapter  of  the  same 
book,  where  the  Amalekites  figure  —  as  alive  as  ever  —  among 
the  tribes  against  whom  David  makes  raid,  leaving  "  neither 
man  nor  woman  alive."  Three  chapters  later  these  twice- 
annihilated  Amalekites  themselves  make  a  raid  and  burn  Ziklag 
and  carry  away  all  the  inhabitants  thereof,  including  a  couple 
of  David's  wives.  David,  however,  not  to  be  balked,  burst  upon 
the  revelling  conquerors  and  "  recovered  all  that  the  Amalekites 
had  taken,"  and  "  there  escaped  not  a  man  of  them."  Even 
now  the  Amalekites  are  not  done  for:  there  is  literally  a  saving 
clause,  for  the  verse  proceeds :  "  Save  four  hundred  young 
men  who  rode  upon  camels  and  fled."  Evidently  the  prior 
reports  of  the  "  annihilation  "  of  the  Amalekites  are  Oriental, 
or  shall  we  say  "  official  "?  They  were  doubtless  designed  to 
bolster  up  the  imaginary  honour  of  Jehovah  as  an  efficient  deity, 
faithful  to  the  legendary  bargain  with  Israel.  One  doubts  even 
if  Saul  or  David  had  smitten  the  Amalekites  as  ruthlessly  as 
the  official  versions  boasted,  for  was  it  likely  in  those  days  of 
blood-feuds  that  in  that  case  the  Amalekites,  when  successful  in 
the  counter-raid  at  Ziklag,  would  have  merely  carried  off  the 
wives,  sons  and  daughters  captured  there,  so  that  David  was 
able  to  recapture  them  unharmed? 


It  needs,  we  have  seen,  no  profound  scholarship,  no  subtle 
dialectic,  to  traverse  and  demolish  Sir  Charles  Bruce's  thesis: 
the  simplest  reference  to  his  own  source  of  evidence,  the  Bible,  is 
sufficient.      There  was  no  general  command  or  design  to  extir- 

172 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

pate  the  heathen.  The  conquest  of  Moab  was  indeed  especially 
banned  on  the  ground  of  the  prior  historical  right  of  another 
branch  of  the  clan.  "  Be  not  at  enmity  with  Moab,  neither 
contend  with  them  in  battle ;  for  I  will  not  give  thee  of  his  land 
for  a  possession ;  because  I  have  given  Ar  unto  the  children  of 
Lot  for  a  possession."  There  may  have  been  as  much  prudence 
as  chivalry  in  this  prohibition,  for  the  inscription  on  the 
Moabite  stone,  discovered  in  186'8  and  now  in  the  Louvre, 
reveals  the  Moabites  as  no  less  fanatically  persuaded  of  the 
protection  of  their  God  Chemosh  than  the  Jews  of  Jehovah's. 
Nor  does  the  prohibition  seem  to  have  been  respected  when  the 
Israelites  grew  stronger.  But  on  the  other  hand  in  the  cases 
where  destruction  was  commanded,  it  was  not  invariably  carried 
out ;  not  only  because  some  of  the  tribes  remained  unconquerable 
so  that  the  invaders  had  to  put  up  with  their  presence,  but  also 
because  in  a  number  of  instances  where  the  natives  did  submit, 
the  victors  preferred  to  make  them  tributary.  (See  Judges, 
i.  28,  30,  33,  35.) 

This  mildness,  this  neglect  to  extirpate,  is,  however,  inter- 
preted by  the  incurable  Sir  Charles  Bruce  as  only  a  refinement 
of  Jewish  malignity.  For  lest  his  readers,  though  they  might 
be  expected  not  to  look  up  the  matter  in  the  Bible,  might  be 
smitten  by  the  doubt  whether  the  few  million  Jews  in  Palestine 
could  ever  really  have  harboured  such  an  insane  hope  as  to 
eradicate  —  not  simply  conquer  but  eradicate  —  not  only  its 
autochthones  but  all  the  populations  of  the  great  Empires  of 
antiquity  into  the  bargain,  Sir  Charles  Bruce  explains  that 
prisoners  of  war  were  kept  alive  and  "  adopted  into  the  com- 
munity under  conditions  of  servitude,"  with  the  Machiavellian 
design  of  enlarging  Israel  for  his  world-swallowing  role;  it  being 
manifest  that  "  the  natural  increase  of  heredity  multiplied  by 
polygamy  and  concubinage  "  would  not  suffice  for  this  super- 
Alexandrian  achievement.  But  where  did  Sir  Charles  Bruce 
find  warrant  for  his  statement  that  prisoners  of  war,  male  and 
female,  were  "  adopted  into  the  community  under  conditions  of 
servitude  "  ? 

We  have  already  seen  how  female  prisoners  of  war  fared  if 
married  by  Israelites  and  then  divorced,  and  a  further  light  is 
thrown  by  Leviticus  xix.  34  upon  the  treatment  of  the  alien 
question  under  the  Mosaic  code.  "  If  a  stranger  sojourn  with 
thee  in  your  land,  ye  shall  do  him  no  wrong.  The  stranger  that 
sojourneth  with  you  shall  be  unto  you  as  the  home-born  among 
you,  and  thou  shalt  love  him  as  thyself ;  for  ye  were  strangers  in 

173 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

the  land  of  Egypt."  But  if  by  prisoners  of  war  Sir  Charles 
Bruce  means  not  the  few  survivors  of  slaughter,  but  whole 
conquered  or  surrendered  tribes,  by  the  adoption  of  whom  the 
community  fortified  itself,  then  his  language  is  very  loose.  For 
there  is  a  vast  difference  between  exacting  tribute  or  military 
assistance  from  a  tribe  and  reducing  its  individuals  to  servitude. 
And  even  if  Israel  gradually  incorporated  the  conquered  tribes 
and  areas  into  his  little  kingdom,  that  is  an  operation  elemen- 
tally simple,  repeated  ad  nauseam  in  universal  history,  and  car- 
rying no  such  lurid  design  of  world-destruction.  Moreover,  if 
Israel  did  admit  these  other  peoples  into  the  heritage  of  the 
promise,  it  disposes  of  his  much-denounced  tribalism.  The  fact 
is,  that  the  honesty  of  the  Jewish  historian  of  the  Bible  has  been 
the  undoing  of  his  people.  While  other  nations  carefully  avert 
their  eyes  from  the  shambles  on  which  they  are  established, 
Israel,  by  facing  life  steadily,  and  facing  it  whole,  has  written 
himself  down  a  brute,  compared  with  these  elegant  peoples 
whose  history  has  been  tricked  out  by  their  poets,  and  who  have 
carried  forward  in  their  consciousness  and  their  literature  only 
its  most  glorious  aspects.  Imagine  if  that  passage  in  Green 
had  formed  part  of  the  liturgy  of  the  English  church,  "  familiar 
in  our  mouths  as  household  words." 


VI 

Great  indeed  is  the  power  of  the  written  word.  Everywhere 
it  interposes  between  man  and  the  facts,  between  the  eye  and 
fresh  personal  vision.  Nowhere  has  this  obscuring  power  been 
more  marked  than  in  the  blindness  produced  by  the  Bible  to  the 
most  glaring  phenomena  in  the  life  of  the  people  whose  epic  it 
once  constituted.  It  has  fixed  the  ever-living  Jew  as  unchange- 
ably as  the  dead  Roman  or  the  ancient  Greek.  It  forbids  his 
development.  From  the  last  page  of  the  Bible  to  the  first  page 
of  the  Doar  Hayom,  the  Jerusalem  daily,  he  has  rarely  ceased 
to  expand  and  create;  yet  he  is  eternally  what  he  once  was. 
The  Book  says  so.  It  is  the  museum  in  which  he  is  perpetually 
exhibited.  Because,  for  example,  the  Old  Testament  has  no 
definite  promise  of  individual  immortality  except  in  a  solitary 
reference  to  Resurrection  in  Daniel  xii.  2,  it  is  assumed  that  the 
modern  Jew  has  still  no  gospel  of  future  life.  But  we  know 
that  while  the  Old  Testament  was  still  uncompleted,  Jews, 
streaming  back  to  Palestine  from  Persia  after  the  second 
Temple  was  built,  brought  back  from  Zoroastrianism  the  doc- 

174 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

trine  of  post-mortem  Retribution  and  the  whole  paraphernalia 
of  Heaven  and  Hell.  If  a  Jewish  prayer-book  or  the  Thirteen 
Articles  of  Maimonides  were  not  accessible  to  Sir  Charles 
Bruce,  he  had  only  to  walk  through  a  Jewish  cemetery  to  see 
that  the  faith  in  resurrection  is  no  less  lively  than  in  the 
neighbouring  churchyard.  Yet  he  tells  us  that  the  Jew 
throughout  the  ages  has  found  sufficient  stimulation  in  the  im- 
mortality of  his  race.  This  would  not  matter  so  much  if  Sir 
Charles  Bruce  had  not  assumed  likewise  that  the  sustaining 
vision  has  been  that  same  fantastic  conception  of  world-dom- 
inance by  extermination.  And  here  we  reach  the  really  mon- 
strous part  of  Sir  Charles  Bruce's  case.  For  a  Jew  remaining 
in  soecula  scecwlorum  what  he  was  four  thousand  years  ago  — 
though,  of  course,  even  then  he  was  far  from  realising  Sir 
Charles  Bruce's  vision  of  him  —  it  follows  that  he  is  still  pur- 
suing sedulously,  if  subterraneously,  his  old  game  of  enthroning 
world-Jewry  on  the  ruins  of  all  other  civilisations ;  mining  what 
he  can  no  longer  conquer  above  ground,  but  still,  like  Marlowe's 
Tamburlaine, 

"  Measuring  the  limits  of  his  empery 
By  East  and  West,  as  Phcebus  does  his  course." 

Recently  I  was  startled  to  see  at  the  head  of  a  letter  in  the 
Times  the  words  in  large  capitals :  "  The  Mosaic  Law  in 
Politics."  I  naturally  thought  it  was  rebuking  the  savage 
expression  in  European  life  of  the  Old  Testament  maxim: 
"  Eye  for  eye,  tooth  for  tooth  " —  that  maxim,  winch  has  for 
so  long  replaced  the  New  Testament  mildness ;  that  sad  Ersatz, 
or  substitute,  on  which  Christendom  has  subsisted  during  the 
war,  in  the  course  of  which  the  world's  stock  of  goodness  has 
given  out,  like  so  many  other  precious  commodities.  I  was 
mistaken.  The  letter  referred  not  to  the  European  debacle, 
not  to  our  repaying  barbarism  by  barbarism,  but  exclusively  to 
the  ferocity  of  the  Jews,  who  were  declared  to  be  running 
Bolshevism  in  Russia,  purely  and  simply  as  a  means  of  avenging 
themselves  upon  the  country  that  had  persecuted  them;  and 
they  were  begged  to  abandon  the  unique  and  unparalleled 
vengefulness  of  their  Shylockian  species ;  otherwise  they  would 
be  massacred. 

The  letter,  which  was  signed  "  Verax  " —  by  a  slip  of  the  pen, 
I  suppose,  for  "  Mendax  " —  was,  of  course,  merely  one  of  Lord 
Northcliffe's  numerous  devices  for  saving  his  Koltchaks  and 
Denikins  and  discounting  their  massacres.     The  Mosaic  maxim 

175 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

in  question  had  been  practically  obsolete  in  Jewry  before  Jesus 
was  born,  and  my  bitter  amusement  at  seeing  it  now  ascribed  to 
the  only  race  that  had  outgrown  it,  was  intensified  by  the 
remembrance  that  a  week  or  two  earlier  the  concord  of  a  dinner 
party  had  been  seriously  impaired  by  my  quarrel  with  a  vicar's 
wife,  who  maintained  stoutly  that  "  Eye  for  eye,  tooth  for 
tooth  "  was  the  correct  and  righteous  principle  against  the 
Germans,  and  that  she  was,  in  this  instance,  for  the  Old  Dis- 
pensation. She  seemed  indeed  not  only  to  want  tooth  for  tooth, 
but  a  whole  set  of  teeth,  and  not  only  eye  for  eye,  but  a  pair  of 
gold  eye-glasses  thrown  in. 

But  coming  from  a  clergyman's  wife,  it  was  a  piece  of  can- 
dour, of  almost  German  candour.  I  say  German,  because  it 
was  that  great  Church  newspaper,  the  Christliche  Welt,  which 
proposed  at  the  beginning  of  the  war  a  "  moratorium  for 
Christianity."  To  preach  Christianity,  said  the  journal,  in 
these  days  of  torpedoes  and  poison  gas,  was  only  to  provoke 
"  mocking  hellish  laughter." 

In  the  more  foggy  mentality  of  Britain,  it  did  not  prove 
impossible  to  reconcile  poison  gas  with  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  a 
host  of  war-pulpiteers  arose  —  more  noxious  than  war- 
profiteers  —  to  explain  this  heavenly  harmony.  Even  now 
that  peace  is  nominally  made,  there  is  scant  slackening  in  the 
anti-German  campaign.  Yet  "  Verax  "  could  speculate 
"  whether  the  Law  of  Moses  has  given  the  Jewish  character  its 
hard  and  tenacious  revengefulness  or  whether  the  law  of  Moses 
itself  is  an  expression  of  a  peculiar  race-character."  In  truth 
if  ever  there  was  a  code  soaked  in  kindliness  it  is  the  Mosaic, 
and  if  ever  there  was  a  race  which  was  forgiving  to  the  point  of 
flabbiness,  it  is  the  race  which  styles  itself  "  the  merciful,  the 
sons  of  the  merciful,"  and  of  which  I  have  written : 

"  Faithful  friends  to  our  foemen,  slaves  to  a  scornful  clique, 
The  only  Christians  in  Europe,  turning  the  other  cheek." 

Compare  "  a  tooth  for  a  tooth  "  with  "  a  life  for  a  sheep  " 
which  was  British  law  little  more  than  a  century  ago :  at  which 
period  indeed  no  fewer  than  two  hundred  misdemeanours  were 
punishable  with  death.  The  Jewish  Sanhedrim  which  executed 
one  man  in  seventy  years  was  known  as  "  the  bloody  Sanhedrin." 

"Revenge  is  a  kind  of  wild  justice,"  says  Bacon,  and  the 
canon  of  "  eye  for  eye  "  was  an  attempt  to  remove  the  wildness 
of  revenge  and  leave  only  the  justice.  It  was  not  a  principle  of 
private  revenge  at  all,  but  a  legal  maxim  for  the  guidance  of 

176 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

judges.  The  antithesis  set  up  by  Jesus  was  thus  fallacious,  for 
the  individual  might  quite  well,  after  his  right  eye  had  been 
gouged  out  by  a  brute,  turn  the  other  cheek  to  him  as  Jesus 
recommended,  without  lessening  the  duty  of  the  State  in  the 
interests  of  order  to  remove  the  ruffian's  own  eye.  In  practice, 
of  course,  such  disagreeable  contingencies  were  extremely  rare, 
and  a  money  penalty  soon  replaced  the  crude  operation  of  the 
text,  which  was  even  legally  impracticable  if,  for  example,  the 
accused  was  blind  or  toothless.  But  the  principle  of  exact 
justice  laid  down  in  the  text  is  hardly  to  be  questioned  by  a 
Christendom  which  deliberately  perverted  the  message  of  Edith 
Cavell,  one  of  the  few  Christians  whom  the  war  revealed.  For 
"  Verax  "  to  single  out  "  the  inexorable  vindictiveness  "  of  the 
Jewish  character  in  face  of  the  prevailing  Gentile  psychology, 
demands  a  brazenness  which  the  prince  of  liars  might  envy. 
Civilisation  and  Christianity  are  in  danger,  screams  the  Morn- 
ing Post  in  the  silliest  and  sliest  series  of  articles  that  have  ever 
degraded  British  journalism.  It  is  true.  But  the  danger 
comes  not  from  Judaism  but  from  those  Pagan  or  Prussian 
doctrines  of  which  the  Morning  Post  is  the  naked  and  un- 
ashamed exponent. 

It  is  not  unintelligible  that  Christendom  endowed  with  this 
psychology  should  conceive  Jewry  after  its  own  image.  The 
Spectator  cannot  rid  itself  of  the  notion  that  though  the  Jewish 
world-plot  is  undeniably  a  mare's  nest,  yet  individuals  here  and 
there  must  be  driven  by  their  sufferings  to  join  secret  societies 
for  revenge  upon  the  Christian.  And  that  admirable  American 
organ,  The  Christian  Science  Monitor,  observes :  "  In  the 
centuries  of  mental  and  physical  anguish  through  which  it  has 
been  the  lot  of  the  Jew  to  pass,  slavery  in  Babylon,  torture  in 
the  dungeons  of  the  Inquisition,  massacre  from  the  Dniester  to 
the  Thames,  it  would  have  been  strange  if  there  had  not  been 
born,  out  of  the  madness  of  that  suffering,  Jews  filled  with 
every  conceivable  aspiration  to  rule  in  Christendom,  or  to  whom 
no  scheme  of  revenge  could  be  too  delirious." 

If  from  these  revealing  reflections  of  Christian  psychology  we 
turn  to  the  realities  of  Jewish  psychology,  we  find  no  echo  of 
these  hypotheses  in  the  voice  of  Jerusalem.  Sokolow,  speaking 
in  Hebrew  at  a  great  Zionist  Demonstration,  said :  "  Our 
masses  in  Eastern  Europe  had  been  facing  death  in  seven  circles 
of  hell.  .  .  .  For  this  cold  murder  of  whole  communities  not 
Heaven  itself,  nor  all  the  mercy  of  the  angels  could  find  pallia- 
tion. .  .  .  Its  horror  and  wicked  purposefulness  should  have 

177 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

stunned  the  world  and  cried  for  vengeance.  But  the  sentiment 
of  vengeance  is  strange  to  the  Jewish  people.  An  undying 
fame  is  reserved  for  the  memory  of  our  martyrs.  The  tears 
shed  over  their  graves  will,  we  hope,  only  deepen  the  intensity  of 
Jewish  national  consciousness,  and  in  course  of  time  be 
dried  by  the  happiness  we  experience  once  more  in  having  our 
own  Home  strong  enough  to  guarantee  the  blessings  of  peace 
and  security."  This  attitude  of  passive  endurance,  combined 
even  with  the  note  that  Israel's  agony  is  a  righteous  punish- 
ment for  sin,  has  provoked  almost  to  madness  the  great  contem- 
porary Hebrew  poet,  Bialik,  already  stricken  to  the  soul  by  the 
spectacle  of  a  pogrom  in  his  own  town.  With  an  Old  Testa- 
ment boldness  the  poet  makes  God  rage  against  Himself. 

"  No  root  of  hatred,  not  a  blade  of  vengeance, 
For  hark,  they  beat  the  breast  and  cry,  Ashamnu! 
They  pray  of  Me  forgiveness  for  their  sin. 
Their  sin?     The  sin  of  shadows  on  the  wall, 
The  sin  of  broken  pots,  or  bruised  worms ! 
What  will  they?     Why  stretch  out  their  hands  to  Me? 
Has  none  a  fist?     And  where's  a  thunderbolt 
To  take  revenge  for  all  the  generations, 
To  blast  the  world  and  tear  the  heav'ns  asunder 
And  wreck  the  universe,  My  throne  of  glory?  " 

When  one  compares  the  drab  realities  of  Jewish  life  with  the 
flamboyant  picture  of  the  Jew  as  a  world-dominator  whether  in 
actuality  or  design,  one  knows  not  whether  to  laugh  or  weep. 
Yet  it  is  this  ludicrous  legend,  this  ineffably  silly  travesty  of  the 
facts,  that  constitutes  the  stock-in-trade  of  the  anti-Semitic 
press  which,  to  the  dishonour  of  British  journalism,  has  recently 
sprung  up  in  our  midst,  and  which  to  parade  its  pretended 
disquiet  recoils  from  no  misrepresentation  or  misquotation  of 
current  Jewish  thought,  my  own  not  excluded.  Sir  Charles 
Bruce  is  not  of  this  gang,  nor  would  he  be  as  deaf  as  the 
Morning  Post  to  all  disproof.  But  he  offers  an  historic  sum- 
mary which  exceeds  even  the  extravagances  of  the  journalists 
in  its  wiJdness  and  in  its  dangerous  implications. 

vn 

"  Under  the  operation  of  the  cosmic  law  of  action  and 
reaction,"  he  writes,  "  the  policy  (i.e.,  Jewry's  policy  of  destruc- 
tion) was  adopted  in  retaliation  bv  every  community  with  which 

178* 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

it  came  in  conflict  and  which  it  menaced  with  destruction  or 
servitude.  To  quote  the  words  of  an  illustrious  member  of 
their  race  — 

"  '  The  attempt  to  extirpate  them  has  been  made  under  the  most 
favourable  auspices  and  on  the  largest  scale;  the  most  considerable 
means  that  man  could  command  have  been  pertinaciously  applied  to 
this  object  for  the  longest  period  of  recorded  time.  Egyptian  Phar- 
aohs, Assyrian  Kings,  Roman  Emperors,  Scandinavian  Crusaders, 
Gothic  Princes  and  holy  inquisitors  have  alike  devoted  their  energies 
to  the  fulfilment  of  this  common  purpose.  Expatriation,  exile,  cap- 
tivity, confiscation,  torture  on  the  most  ingenious  and  massacres  on 
the  most  extensive  scale,  a  curious  system  of  degrading  customs  and 
debasing  laws  which  would  have  broken  the  heart  of  any  other  peo- 
ple, have  been  tried  in  vain.'  " 

Instead  of  being  shocked  by  this  eloquent  survey  of  Disraeli's, 
Sir  Charles  Bruce  regards  all  this  as  but  "  retaliation  "  and 
gives  us  in  fact  an  elaborate  justification  of  Jewish  Persecution 
right  through  the  ages,  up  till  the  day  when  what  he  calls  "  the 
modern  conscience,"  ceasing  to  react  so  crudely,  substituted  a 
policy  of  "  amalgamation  "  for  that  of  "  retaliation."  Even 
now  —  to  judge  from  his  language  —  it  is  only  the  reacting 
force  that  has  civilised  itself,  there  is  nothing  of  "  modern  con- 
science "  about  the  Jewish  force. 

As  history  the  whole  passage  is  deplorable.  Had  Sir  Charles 
Bruce  confined  the  operation  of  his  cosmic  law  of  reaction  to 
the  natives  of  Palestine  during  the  centuries  of  Israel's  struggle 
and  primacy,  it  would  have  been  at  least  plausible.  But  to 
picture  the  world  reacting  against  Israel's  design  of  extermina- 
tion, its  menace  of  "  destruction  and  servitude,"  during  the  cen- 
turies when  Jewry  lay  broken  and  scattered,  a  helpless  and  dis- 
armed minority,  penned  into  Ghettos  or  Mellahs  among  the 
warrior  tribes  of  Christendom  or  Islam,  is  too  patently  absurd. 
One  must  charitably  suppose  that  our  author  means  that  perse- 
cution was  the  traditional  answer  to  the  ancient  aggressiveness 
of  Israel,  and  that  the  sins  of  the  fathers  were  being  visited  on 
the  children  to  the  thirtieth  and  fortieth  generation.  "  Men- 
aced with  destruction  or  servitude  "  forsooth  !  Never  was  there 
a  more  spiritless  people  than  this  Rabbi-ridden  folk,  which 
submitted  its  neck  to  the  yoke,  its  garment  to  the  badge,  its 
cheek  to  the  smiter  (Colaphisation  the  jurists  called  the  ritual 
box  on  the  ear,  which  in  some  towns  the  leading  Jews  received 
annually  on  Good  Friday).     For  after  the  final  revolt  of  Bar 

179 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Cochba  against  the  Romans  early  in  the  second  century,  the 
Maccaba^an  spirit  shrank  into  a  pious  resignation.  The  Jewish 
Exile  was  declared  to  be  the  will  of  God,  which  it  was  even 
blasphemous  to  struggle  against,  and  the  Jews,  in  a  strange  and 
unique  congruity  with  the  teachings  of  the  prophet  they 
rejected,  turned  the  other  cheek  to  the  smiter  and  left  to  Caesar 
the  things  that  were  Caesar's,  concentrating  themselves  in  every 
land  of  the  exile  upon  industry,  domesticity  and  a  transmuted 
religion,  in  which  realities  were  desiccated  into  metaphors,  and 
the  Temple  sacrifices  sublimated  into  prayers. 

|_The  absence  of  a  territory  of  their  own  in  which  new  national 
history  could  be  made  forced  them  to  cling  to  Zion  in  idea,  and 
so  the  religion  which  preserved  them  through  the  long  dark 
centuries  of  dispersion  was  saddled  with  their  old  territorial 
traditions,  preserving  these  equally  in  an  indissoluble  amalgam^ 
Thus  Palestine  soil  clung  still  about  the  roots  of  Judaism,  ana 
the  old  agricultural  festivals  continued  to  be  observed  at  seasons 
with  which,  in  many  lands  of  the  exile,  they  had  no  natural  con- 
nection. The  transplantation  was  effected  only  at  the  cost  of 
fossilisation.  Even  while  the  tribal  traits  had  still  the  potential 
fluidity  of  life,  neither  Greeks  nor  Romans  could  change  this 
tenacious  race.  Its  dispersion  from  Palestine  merely  indurated 
its  traditions  by  freeing  them  from  the  possibility  of  common 
development.  The  religious  customs  defended  by  Josephus 
against  Apion  are  still  the  rule  of  the  majority.  The  last 
national  victory  celebrated  —  that  of  Judas  Maccabaeus  —  is 
two  thousand  years  old ;  the  last  popular  fast  dates  from  the 
first  century  of  the  Christian  era.  The  Jew  agonising  in 
Poland  or  the  Ukraine  rejoices  automatically  in  his  Passover  of 
Freedom,  in  his  exodus  from  Egypt.  Even  new  traits  super- 
imposed by  their  history  upon  fractions  of  the  race  are  con- 
served with  equal  persistency.  The  Jews  expelled  from  Spain 
in  1492  still  retain  a  sub-loyalty  to  the  King  of  Spain  and 
speak  a  Spanish  idiom,  printed  in  Hebrew  characters,  which 
preserves  in  the  Orient  words  vanished  from  the  lips  of  actual 
Spaniards  and  to  be  found  only  in  Cervantes.  But  in  this 
palimpsest  patriotism,  the  basal  tradition  was  still  Palestine. 
The  Rabbinic  opportunism,  to  which  I  have  already  alluded, 
while  on  the  one  hand  keeping  alive  the  hope  that  the  legislation 
and  ritual  of  Palestine,  however  gross,  would  come  back  in  God's 
good  time,  went  so  far  in  the  other  direction  as  to  adopt  a 
decision  of  the  Babylonian  Talmud — "His  country's  law  is 
Israel's  law  "  as  the  dictator  of  the  present.      Everything  in 

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THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

short  —  in  this  transitional  period  between  the  ancient  glory 
and  the  Messianic  era  to  come  — -  was  sacrificed  to  the  ideal  of 
mere  survival.  The  mediaeval  teacher  Maimonides  laid  it  down 
that  to  preserve  life,  even  Judaism  might  be  abandoned  in  all 
but  its  holiest  minimum.  Thus,  under  the  standing  menace  of 
massacre  and  spoliation,  arose  Crypto-Jews  or  Marranos,  who, 
frequently  at  the  risk  of  the  stake  or  the  sword,  carried  on  their 
Judaism  in  secret.  Catholics  in  Spain  and  Portugal,  Protes- 
tants in  England,  they  were  in  Egypt  or  Turkey  Mohammedans. 
Indeed,  the  Donmeh  still  flourish  in  Salonika  and  provide  the 
Young  Turks  with  statesmen,  the  Balearic  Islands  still  shelter 
the  Chuetas,  and  only  half  a  century  ago  persecution  produced 
the  Yedil-al-Islam  in  Central  Asia.1  Russia  must  be  full  of 
Greek  Christians  who  have  remained  Jewish  at  heart.  A  few 
years  before  the  war  a  number  of  Russian  Jews,  shut  out  from  a 
University  career,  and  seeking  the  lesser  apostacy,  became 
Mohammedans,  only  to  find  that  for  them  the  Trinity  was  the 
sole  avenue  to  educational  and  social  salvation. 

Where  existence  could  be  achieved  legally,  yet  not  without 
social  inferiority,  a  minor  form  of  Crypto-Judaism  was  begot- 
ten, which  prevails  to-day  in  most  lands  of  Jewish  emancipation, 
among  its  symptoms  being  change  of  names,  accentuated  local 
patriotism,  accentuated  abstention  from  Jewish  affairs  and 
even  anti-Semitism  mimetically  absorbed  from  the  environment. 
Indeed  Marranoism,  both  in  its  major  and  minor  forms,  may 
be  regarded  as  an  exemplification  of  the  Darwinian  theory  of 
protective  colouring.  This  pervasive  assimilating  force  acts 
even  upon  the  most  faithful,  undermining  more  subtly  than 
persecution  the  life-conceptions  so  tenaciously  perpetuated. 

Nor  till  the  rise  of  Zionism  was  there  anywhere  in  the  Jewish 
world  any  centripetal  force  to  counteract  these  universal 
tendencies  to  dissipation.  The  religion  is  shattered  into  as 
many  fragments  as  the  race.  After  the  fall  of  Jerusalem  the 
Academy  of  Jabneh  carried  on  the  authoritative  tradition  of 
the  Sanhedrin,  and  for  over  a  thousand  years  Babylonia 
through  a  Gaon  or  religious  head  and  an  Exilarch  or  Prince  of 
the  Exile  ruled  with  double  sway  the  scattered  scions  of  Israel. 

In  the  later  Middle  Ages  there  was  the  Asefah  or  Synod  to 
unify  Jews  under  Judaism.  From  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth 
to  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century,  the  Waad  or  Council  of 
Four  Lands  legislated  almost  autonomously  in  those  central 
European  regions  where  the  mass  of  the  Jews  of  the  world  was 
i  A  similar  phenomenon  was  produced  still  more  recently  in  the  Soudan. 

181 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

congregated.  To-day  there  is  no  centre  of  authority,  whether 
religious  or  political.  Even  Zionism,  judged  by  the  "  acid 
test  "  of  subscriptions,  has  never  rallied  more  than  a  minority 
of  the  race.  Reform  itself  is  infinitely  individual,  and  little 
remains  outside  a  few  great  centres  but  a  chaos  of  dissolving 
views  and  dissolving  communities,  saved  from  disappearance  by 
persecution  and  racial  sympathy. 

The  notion,  with  which  I  shall  presently  deal  in  detail,  that 
Jewish  interests  are  Jesuitically  federated  or  that  Jewish  finan- 
ciers use  their  power  for  Jewish  ends  is  one  of  the  most  ironic 
of  myths.  No  Jewish  people  or  nation  now  exists,  no  Jews  even 
as  sectarians  of  a  specific  faith  with  a  specific  centre  of  author- 
itv  such  as  Catholics  or  Weslcyans  possess;  nothing  but  a 
multitude  of  individuals,  a  mob  hopelessly  amorphous,  divided 
alike  in  religion  and  political  destiny.  Whatever  unification 
the  common  work  in  or  on  Palestine  may  effect  ultimately,  there 
is  as  yet  no  common  platform  from  which  the  Jews  can  be 
addressed,  no  common  council  to  which  any  appeal  can  be 
made.  Their  only  unity  is  negative  — ■  that  unity  imposed  by 
the  hostile  hereditary  vision  of  the  ubiquitous  Hainan.  They 
live  in  symbiosis  with  every  other  people,  each  group  surren- 
dered to  its  own  local  fortunes.  This  habit  of  dispersed  and 
dependent  existence  has  become  second  nature,  and  the  Jews 
were  the  first  to  doubt  whether  they  could  now  form  a  polity  of 
their  own.  Like  Aunt  Judy  in  "  John  Bull's  Other  Island," 
who  declined  to  breakfast  out  of  doors  because  the  open  air  was 
"  not  natural,"  the  bulk  of  the  Jewish  leaders  consider  a  Jewish 
State  a  political  perversion,  and  are  only  reconciling  them 
selves  to  the  Palestine  project  because  they  have  at  last  come 
to  understand  it  is  but  another  form  of  serfdom  and  symbiosis. 
There  are  no  subjects  more  zealous  for  their  adopted  father- 
lands: indeeed  they  are  only  too  patriotic.  There  are  no 
Ottomans  so  Young-Turkish  as  the  Turkish  Jews,  no  Americans 
so  spread-eagle  as  the  American  Jews,  no  section  of  Britain  so 
Jingo  as  Anglo-Jewry,  which  even  converts  the  Chanukkah 
Celebration  of  Maccabsean  valour  into  a  British  military  fes- 
tival. Before  the  war  the  French  Jewry  and  the  German 
reproduced  in  miniature  the  Franco-German  rivalries  and  tin- 
latter  even  aped  the  aggressive  WcltpoUtik.  All  this  ultra- 
patriotism  is  probably  due  to  the  fact  that  Jews  feel  consciously 
what  the  other  citizens  lake  as  a  matter  of  course;  doubtless 
too  a  certain  measure  of  Marranoism  or  protective  mimicry 
enters    into    the    ostentation.     At    any    rate,    each    section  of 

182 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Jewry,  wherever  it  is  permitted  entrance  into  the  general  life, 
invariably  evolves  a  somewhat  over-coloured  version  of  the  life 
in  which  it  finds  itself  embedded,  and  fortunate  must  be 
accounted  the  peoples  which  have  at  hand  so  gifted  and  service- 
able a  race,  proud  to  wear  their  livery. 

Yet  for  Sir  Charles  Bruce,  Israel  still  lies  glooming,  like  a 
python  about  to  spring  and  envelop  the  world  in  its  monstrous 
folds.  His  final  word  about  the  race,  as  he  turns  to  other 
aspects  of  his  ethical  theme,  leaves  us  with  the  stock  tableau  of 
the  Jew  in  "  dominant  control  over  finance,"  with  "  a  practical 
ascendency  over  the  press  of  Europe,  and,  through  these  com- 
bined agencies,  a  large  measure  of  control  over  the  ultimate 
issues  of  peace  and  war." 

VIII 

"  Beyond  all  question  the  most  formidable  and  the  most 
remarkable  race  which  has  ever  appeared  in  the  world,"  corrob- 
orates Mr.  Winston  Churchill,  writing  in  a  Sunday  paper. 
Formidable?  This  disunited  and  pitiful  horde,  these  homeless 
wanderers,  a  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  of  whom  have  just 
been  massacred  in  the  Ukraine,  these  wretchedly  poor  and 
sweated  masses,  formidable?  To  whom?  To  what?  Un- 
doubtedly they  produce  geniuses  and  plutocrats  beyond  their 
due  average.  Although  they  constituted  but  one  per  cent,  of 
the  German  population,  seven  out  of  thirty-one  "  makers  of 
modern  Germany  "  in  that  popular  book,  "  Men  Around  the 
Kaiser,"  were  of  their  race.  Owing  to  their  super-normal 
brain-power  and  energy,  there  is  this  disproportionate  number 
of  Jews  in  every  role  on  earth,  especially  those  roles  that  are  in 
the  limelight,  even  literally  in  the  limelight.  They  seem  almost 
like  "the  fifth  element  "  that  Pope  Boniface  VII.  called  the 
Florentines.  But  the  bulk  of  these  roles  will  be  found  of  an 
intermediary  character  —  the  Jew  is  occupied  not  in  destroying 
Christendom  but  in  interlinking  it,  making  it  more  essentially 
Christian  in  fact.  His  gift  of  tongues,  his  relationship  with 
all  the  lands  of  the  exile,  mark  him  out  for  this  function  in  its 
various  aspects  of  commerce  and  finance,  journalism  and  crit- 
icism, scholarship  and  travel,  connoisseurship  and  art-dealing. 
It  was  by  their  linguistic  talents  that  the  adventurous  journeys 
of  Arminius  Vambery,  Aurel  Stein,  Sven  Hedin  and  Emin  Pasha 
were  made  possible.  If  a  Russian-American  Jew,  Berenson,  is 
the  chief  authority  on  Italian  art,  and  Georg  Brandes,  the 

183 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Dane,  is  Europe's  greatest  critic,  if  Reuter  initiated  telegraphic 
news  and  Blowitz  was  the  prince  of  foreign  correspondents,  if 
Charles  Frohman  was  the  world's  greatest  entrepreneur  and 
Imre  Kiralfy  ran  its  exhibitions,  all  these  phenomena  find  their 
explanation  in  the  cosmopolitanism  of  the  Jewish  intelligentsia. 
For  when  the  Jew  grows  out  of  his  own  Ghetto  without  narrow- 
ing into  his  neighbour's,  he  must  necessarily  possess  a  superior 
sense  of  perspective.  Lifted  to  the  plane  of  idealism,  this  cos- 
mopolitan habit  of  mind  creates  Socialism  through  Karl  Marx 
and  Lassalle,  an  international  language  through  Dr.  Zamenhof, 
the  inventor  of  Esperanto,  a  prophecy  of  the  end  of  war 
through  Jean  de  Bloch,  an  International  Institute  of  Agricul- 
ture through  David  Lubin,  and  a  Race  Congress  through  Dr. 
Felix  Adler.  . 

Even  where  the  Jew  has  contributed  directly  to  the  arts,  it  is 
rarel}7  in  a  specifically  Jewish  spirit,  and  the  great  mark  he  has 
made  on  the  stage  may  not  uncharitably  be  attributed  to  that 
same  plasticity  which  produces  his  biological  mimicry  and 
enables  him  to  assimilate  to  all  races  without  fusing  in  any. 
The  great  comedian,  says  Diderot,  in  his  well-known  paradox  on 
the  type,  is  a  creature  of  intellect  who  is  not  carried  away  by 
any  of  his  assumptions.  And  so  we  find  Rachel,  the  child  of  a 
foreign  pedlar  in  a  Paris  slum,  enthralling  the  Faubourg  St. 
Germain  and  teaching  it  purity  of  diction.  Sarah  Bernhardt, 
the  daughter  of  Dutch  Jews,  carries  the  triumph  of  French 
acting  across  the  Atlantic.  A  Hungarian  Jew,  Ludwig 
Barnay,  played  a  leading  role  in  the  theatrical  history  of 
German}7,  and  another,  von  Sonnenthal,  in  that  of  Austria. 
For  England  we  have  Kean,  and  for  America  Booth,  to  name 
only  stars  of  the  first  magnitude,  for  the  minor  coruscations 
are  innumerable.  Recently  a  Yiddish-speaking  actor,  Mosco- 
vitch,  who  must  fain  study  Shakespeare  like  a  foreign  classic, 
held  London  spell-bound  with  his  Shylock.  Charlie  Chaplin 
heads  the  picture-world.  And  that  there  is  now  a  Shakespeare 
Day  in  England  is  due  to  the  success  of  two  Jewish  scholars  — 
Sir  Israel  Gollancz  and  Sir  Sidney  Lee  —  in  imposing  their 
own  reverential  consciousness  upon  this  casual  and  illiterate 
island. 

In  the  other  interpretative  or  intermediary  arts  we  find 
equally  that  Jews  flourish  out  of  all  proportion  to  their  num- 
bers. They  flood  the  concert-platforms  —  whether  as  con- 
ductors, singers,  or  performers.  Joachim  and  Rubinstein  are 
dead,  but  what  a  marvellous  posse  of  living  instrumentalists  — 

184 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Kreisler,  Jascha  Heifetz,  Mischa  Elman,  Melsa,  Zirabalist, 
Mark  Hambourg,  Rosenthall,  Moiseiwitch,  Benham,  Irene 
Scharrer,  Fannie  Zeisler,  et  id  genus  omne,  most  of  them  infant 
prodigies  to  boot! 

The  lack  of  Jewish  initiative  —  on  the  heroic  scale  at  least  — 
may  be  seen  in  the  musicians  (Mendelssohn,  Meyerbeer,  Halevi, 
Cowen,  Salaman,  Landon  Ronald,  etc.)  though  if  Schonberg  be 
a  Jew,  he  is  certainly  an  exception  to  the  melodiousness  which 
characterises  this  Jewish  music  and  which  finds  its  gayest 
expression  in  the  light  operas  of  Offenbach,  Goldmark,  Oscar 
Straus,  Leoncavallo  and  Sullivan.  There  is  little  of  the  con- 
quering or  even  the  agonising  Jew  in  these  shallow  rivulets. 
Nor  is  there  anything  epoch-making  in  the  Jewish  contribution 
to  painting,  admirable  and  innumerable  as  are  the  Jewish  artists 
from  Josef  Israels  to  Max  Lieberman  and  Klinger,  and  copi- 
ously as  they  are  represented  in  every  gallery  and  movement, 
ranging  in  England  for  example  from  the  Academy  with  that 
master-craftsman,  Solomon  J.  Solomon,  to  the  wilder  haunts  of 
Gertler,  or  the  half-way  houses  of  Wolmark  and  Rothenstein. 
There  is  surely  nothing  Jewish  in  the  one  Nobel  artist-prizeman, 
Leo  Bakst.  On  the  contrary,  what  the  success  of  the  Jewish 
artists  indicates  is  the  rapidity  with  which  the  racial  tabu  of 
living  form  has  been  outlived,  and  the  Gentile  point  of  view 
assimilated,  and  this  is  especially  remarkable  in  the  forbidden 
realm  of  sculpture  in  which  Antokolsky  reached  world-fame 
and  to  which  Epstein,  though  far  from  expressing  Semitic  sub- 
limity, is  making  one  of  the  Jew's  few  creative  contributions. 

In  the  writing  of  plays  and  novels  the  same  psychological 
mobility  that  produces  the  actor  is  turned  on  the  creation  of 
character.  Jewish  dramatists  are  in  evidence  in  every  country. 
To  speak  only  of  to-day,  London  has  its  Sutro,  New  York  its 
Belasco,  Paris  its  Bernstein,  Berlin  its  Fulda,  Vienna  its 
Schnitzler,  Holland  its  Heijermans,  Hungary  its  Lengyel,  Italy 
its  Benelli.  But  only  two  have  concerned  themselves  with 
Jewish  life,  and  of  these  Bernstein  is  ignorant  and  Heijermans 
antipathetic.  In  other  branches  of  literature  it  is  the  same 
story.  In  France,  for  example,  where  a  Catulle  Mendes,  or  an 
Armand  Silvestre,  with  their  set  gaulois,  have  been  indistinguish- 
able from  the  Christian  boulevardier,  only  now  are  real  Jewish 
poets  appearing  like  Andre  Spire  or  real  Jewish  novelists  like 
Jean  Richard  Bloch.  If  there  is  any  other  great  Jewish 
novelist  in  the  rest  of  Europe,  and  I  believe  there  is  either  a 
Dutch  or  a  Scandinavian,  I  am  at  least  sure  he  is  not  concerned 

185 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

with  the  interpretation  of  the  Jew,  or  the  Jewish  spirit. 
Neither  is  Ronetti  Roman,  who  seems  to  be  the  greatest  poet 
Rumania  has  produced.  Carducci  was  as  definitely  Italian. 
This  absence  of  Jewish  colouring  cannot  be  alleged  of  the 
greatest  creative  name  in  modern  Jewish  literature  —  Heine. 
Nevertheless  even  he  conceived  of  himself  as  an  intermediary, 
whose  primary  role  was  to  interpret  France  and  Germany  to 
each  other. 

Jews  have  indeed  —  even  to  the  un jaundiced  eye  —  been 
playing  no  inconsiderable  part  in  world-affairs,  whether  we  look 
to  the  financiers,  the  Rothschilds,  Cassels,  Schiffs,  Speyers,  and 
Barnatos,  or  to  the  journalists  (Maximilian  Harden,  Benedikt, 
"  Pertinax,"  Sir  Sidney  Low,  Lord  Burnham,  etc.),  or  to  the 
politicians  (Lord  Reading,  Edwin  Montagu,  Klotz,  Kurt 
Eisner,  Trotsky,  Luzzatto,  etc.),  but  with  the  exception  of 
Schiff,  who  refused  to  finance  the  Russia  of  the  Czar,  can  any 
one  trace  in  their  activities  even  as  much  subconscious  Jewish 
sympathy  as  influenced  Beaconsfield  ?  Can  any  one  imagine 
Clemenceau's  Jewish  secretary,  Mandel,  jogging  his  master's 
elbow  at  the  Peace  Conference  in  favour  of  a  Hebrew  Palestine? 
As  little  as  one  can  imagine  Sir  John  Monash  marching  to 
Jerusalem  —  unless  ordered  by  Foch  —  or  the  great  Jewish 
chess-champions  sacrificing  their  bishops  in  some  obscure  anti- 
Christian  spasm. 

It  is  in  fact  in  the  impersonal  and  international  spheres  of 
science,  philosophy  and  scholarship  that,  the  race  of  Spinoza 
has  won  its  greatest,  triumphs  since  it  emerged  from  the  Ghetto. 
Here  the  record  is  overwhelming.  At  least  five  of  the  Nobel 
prizes  for  Science  have  already  been  awarded  to  Jews:  Albert 
Michelson  (optics),  Gabriel  Lippmann  (colour  photography), 
Henri  Moissan  (chemistry),  Dr.  Barony  (otology),  Wilstatter 
(chlorophyll).  In  a  race  that  for  eighteen  centuries  has  been 
bent  over  its  books,  parasitic  on  the  past,  this  genius  for 
observation  is  staggering,  till  one  recalls  Leviticus  and  the 
practical  priestly  supplement  to  the  prophetic  ethics.  Among 
many  other  outstanding  contributors  to  Scienee  may  be  men- 
tioned Heinrich  Herz  (electro-magnetic  waves,  wireless  teleg- 
raphy), Meldola  (coal-tar  dyes),  Hcrtha  Ayrton  (electric 
arc),  J.  F.  Cohn  (bacteriology),  Jacques  Loeb  (partheno- 
genesis)] Mendeleeff  (the  periodic  law),  Lombroso  (crimi- 
nology), Freud  and  Jung  (  psychology),  Einstein  (physics,  new 
theory  of  Space).  It  is  no  wonder  thai  the  Presidency  of  our 
Roval  Society  has  fallen  to  a  Jew. 

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THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

As  a  physician  the  Jew's  fame  dates  from  Saracenic  Spain, 
when  he  was  the  bearer  of  Arabian  science,  and  the  tradition 
that  kings  shall  always  have  Jewish  physicians  is  still  unbroken. 
Dr.  Ehrlich's  recent  discovery  of  "  606,"  the  cure  for  syphilis, 
Dr.  Haffkine's  inoculation  against  the  plague  in  India,  and  the 
researches  of  Dr.  Simon  Flexner,  of  the  Rockefeller  Institute, 
are  but  links  in  the  long  chain  of  Jewish  contributions  to  the 
peculiarly  international  sphere  of  medicine ;  while  Max  Nordau, 
an  epitome  of  every  Jewish  talent,  is  also,  like  Maimonides  and 
so  many  other  Jewish  thinkers,  a  practising  physician. 

Nor  are  the  contributions  to  the  more  humanistic  sciences 
less  amazing.  The  names  of  Benfey  (Sanscrit),  Jules  Oppert 
(Assyriology),  Sylvester  and  Georg  Cantor  (mathematics), 
Breal  (semantics),  Salomon  Reinach  (universal  scholarship), 
Asser  (juristics),  Hermann  Cohen  and  Bergson  (philosophy) 
may  suffice  as  examples. 

If  the  legend  of  the  Conquering  Jew  meant  his  emergence 
from  "  that  curious  system  of  degrading  customs  and  debasing 
laws  "  not  merely  not  broken-hearted  but  able  to  pour  forth 
streams  of  courageous  vitality  on  every  field  of  life  and  thought, 
"  a  blessing  to  all  the  families  of  the  earth,"  then  the  legend 
would  be  true  indeed.  But  I  can  readily  understand  that  the 
Gentile,  seeing  himself  surrounded  or  even  swamped  on  every 
hand  by  famous  Jewish  figures,  should  imagine  a  menacing  cohe- 
sion, when  there  is  no  more  solidarity  among  the  celebrities  than 
among  those  at  Madame  Tussaud's.  And  what  fosters  the 
great  Jewish  legend  of  ubiquity  and  omnipotence  still  further 
is  the  attribution  of  Jewishness  to  every  notoriety  of  any 
traceable  streak  of  Jewish  blood:  a  method  of  classification 
which,  in  the  case  of  a  people  scattered  for  two  thousand  years 
among  every  other  in  Europe,  and  intermarrying  with  all, 
cannot  fail  to  justify  Lowell's  maxim:  Cherchez  le  juif.  And 
le  juif  may  be  sought  with  peculiar  facility  in  countries  like 
Spain  and  Portugal,  whence,  as  we  have  seen,  expulsions  en 
masse  could  no  more  drive  him  out  than  Nature  could  be  driven 
out  with  a  pitchfork,  or  in  those  intolerant  regions  of  the  East 
or  West  where  he  has  been  absorbed  by  Christianity  or  Islam, 
sometimes  after  an  interval  of  Marranoism,  or  pseudo-con- 
version. And  according  to  the  theories  of  Mendelism,  there  is 
no  reason  why  among  the  many  throws  of  the  dice  of  ancestry 
an  individual  of  mixed  descent  should  not  suddenly  incarnate  a 
preponderance  of  the  qualities  of  a  single  strain.  Thus  a 
Jewish  soul  may  appear  and  energise  in  some  powerful  figure 

187 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

of  Christendom.  Sometimes  the  Christianity  of  the  figure  is 
merely  supposititious.  Even  as  I  write,  a  book  is  published 
revealing  that  John  Zoffany,  the  British  Royal  Academician, 
the  delineator  of  English  life,  who  painted  Garrick  and  Dr. 
Johnson,  was  by  origin  a  Bohemian  Jew  —  a  fact  utterly  un- 
known to  the  Jewish  Encyclopedia.  The  Church  could  not 
even  write  its  own  history :  that  was  left  for  the  Jew,  Neander 
(David  Mendel).  One  wonders  what  the  tale  would  be  both  for 
yesterday  and  to-day  if  every  Jew  wore  a  yellow  badge  and 
every  crypto-Jew  came  into  the  open,  and  every  half-Jew  were 
as  discoverable  as  the  author  of  "  Caste,"  or  the  composer  of 
"  The  Mikado."  To  the  Gentile  the  true  Jewish  problem 
should  rather  be  how  to  keep  the  Jew  in  his  midst  —  this  rare 
one  per  cent,  of  mankind.  The  elimination  of  all  this  genius 
and  geniality  would  surely  not  enhance  the  gaiety  of  nations. 
Without  Disraeli  would  not  England  lose  her  only  Saint's  Day? 

No  wonder  Mr.  Daniels,  the  secretary  of  the  American 
Navy,  speaking  at  a  Zionist  gathering  in  the  States,  humor- 
ously threatened  to  bar  the  departure  of  American  Jews  for 
Palestine  with  a  ten-inch  gun. 

But  the  miracle  remains  that  the  Gentile  world  has  never  yet 
seen  a  Jew,  for  behind  all  these  cosmopolitan  types  which  obsess 
its  vision  stand  inexhaustible  reserves  of  Jewish  Jews  —  and 
the  Talmudic  mystic,  the  Hebrew-speaking  sage,  remains  as 
unknown  to  the  Western  world  as  though  he  were  hidden  in  the 
fastnesses  of  Tibet.  A  series  of  great  scholars  —  Geiger,  Zunz, 
Steinschneider,  Schechter  —  has  studied  the  immense  Hebrew 
literature  produced  from  age  to  age  in  these  obscure  Jewries. 
But  there  is  a  modern  Hebrew  literature,  too,  a  new  galaxy  of 
poets  and  novelists,  philosophers  and  humanists,  who  express  in 
the  ancient  tongue  the  subtlest  shades  of  the  thought  of  to-day. 
And  there  is  a  still  more  copious  literature  in  Yiddish,  no  less 
rich  in  men  of  talent  and  even  genius,  whose  names  have  rarely 
reached  the  outside  world. 

But  never  and  nowhere  in  all  that  specifically  Jewish  litera- 
ture will  be  found  the  faintest  scintilla  of  any  design,  expecta- 
tion, or  desire  to  subjugate  the  world. 

IX 

And  if  a  leisured  and  conscientious  thinker  of  Sir  Charles 
Brace's  calibre  and  fine  temper  goes  so  grotesquely  astray,  what 
should  be  expected  of  the  popular  journalists,  whose  very  pro- 

188 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

fession  is  to  be  in  a  hurry,  to  write  and  not  to  read,  and  to 
spoon-feed  the  mob  with  its  own  prejudices?  In  the  days  when 
the  world  resounded  with  denunciations  and  commendations  of 
Bolshevism,  and  an  official  fog  lay  heavy  over  Russia,  there  came 
to  me  out  of  the  mist  the  diary  of  a  British  lady  who  had  lived 
in  an  obscure  town  through  the  thick  of  the  Red  Revolution. 
Unconscious  of  the  fierce  debate  that  was  about  to  rage  in  the 
rest  of  the  world  over  its  theories  or  its  doings,  she  had  re- 
corded the  petty  happenings  of  day  to  day,  with  the  dulness 
of  a  Defoe  and  with  the  same  cumulative  convincingness. 
There  was  just  the  dash  of  blood  to  show  that  the  general  run 
was  small  beer.  It  seemed  to  me  infinitely  precious  not  only 
for  history,  but  for  current  politics,  and  I  perused  it  eagerly. 
But  on  submitting  it,  at  her  request,  to  an  experienced  literary 
agent,  I  learnt  that  in  Iris  apprehension  "  editors  would  feel  that 
very  few  of  their  readers  would  be  sufficiently  interested  to 
read  more  than  a  few  lines,"  and  that  "  what  the  papers  are 
really  looking  out  for  is  something  that  they  can  make  a  great 
splash  about  and  that  will  have  advertising  value  for  them  " — ■ 
something  presumably  like  that  description  in  The  Times  of  the 
atrocities  perpetrated  by  the  Jewish  Commissaries  —  horrors 
outdoing  the  ghastliest  imagining  of  a  Poe  but  vouched  for  by 
"  Miss  Inigo  Jones,"  a  lady  who,  the  moment  I  questioned  her 
bona  fides  or  her  sanity,  "  softly  and  suddenly  vanished  away  " 
like  the  boojum. 

Populus  vult  decipi,  decipiatwr.  Corrupted,  or  perhaps  only 
expressed,  by  the  cinema,  it  cannot  away  with  plain  truth,  it 
has  no  interest  in  ascertaining  it,  and  if  nothing  sufficiently 
flamboyant  exists,  it  must  be  invented. 

That  is,  perhaps,  explanation  enough  of  the  lurid  figure  cut 
by  the  Jew  in  the  popular  imagination  which,  whether  about  him 
or  anything  else,  can  think  only  in  terms  of  melodrama.  And 
yet  something  peculiarly  fabular  seems  to  attach  to  all  treat- 
ment of  the  Hebrew.  It  is  perhaps  some  dim  response  in  the 
mob  to  the  real  romance  of  his  survival,  of  that  indestructible 
potency  in  the  teeth  of  all  the  efforts  recapitulated  in  Sir 
Charles  Bruce's  quotation  from  Disraeli. 

In  a  curious  play  called  "  Es  Geht  Weiter,"  produced  with 
success  in  Vienna  in  1919,  a  knighted  Jew  from  America  (  !)  who 
combines  the  multiple  newspaper  proprietorship  of  a  North- 
cliffe  with  the  territorial  ambitions  of  a  Cecil  Rhodes,  the  finan- 
cial operations  of  a  Rothschild  and  the  philanthropic  projects 
of  a  General  Booth,  turns  —  in  the  Epilogue  after  he  has  ruined 

189 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Rome  —  from  a  street  newsvendor  crying  the  bankruptcy  of 
his  own  schemes  into  a  gigantic  figure  dominating  the  land- 
scape, and  passes  on  —  The  Wandering  Jew  —  to  fresh  incar- 
nations of  catastrophic  omnipotence. 

Nothing  in  fact  is  —  to  believe  the  anti-Semite  —  too  colossal 
for  the  Jew  to  have  achieved.  He  has  at  once  made  the  world- 
war  and  pulled  the  strings  of  the  peace-traps.  And  similarly 
nothing  is  too  small.  Vide  for  example  the  warning  given  to 
the  world  last  year  by  Dr.  Hallinan,  Bishop  of  Limerick,  as  to 
the  true  inwardness  of  the  latest  feminine  fashions.  "  The  new 
modes,"  wrote  the  learned  Bishop,  "  are  designed  not  by  women 
but  by  men  —  Parisians,  Jews  and  Freemasons  —  seeking  to 
uproot  Christianity  by  these  dangerous  and  indecent  dresses." 
It  was  Jews  who  murdered  the  Czar,  an  accusation  actually 
incorporated  in  the  British  White  Book,  and  still  exploited  by 
The  Times  and  the  reactionary  Russians,  despite  that  even  the 
Minister  of  Justice  under  Koltchak's  Government  has  certified 
"  that,  among  the  number  of  persons  proved  by  the  data  of  the 
preliminary  enquiry  to  have  been  guilty  of  the  assassination  of 
the  late  Emperor  Nicholas  II.  and  his  family,  there  was  not  any 
person  of  Jewish  descent."  Of  course  the  Jews  ruined  Ger- 
many, both  by  overturning  the  Kaiser  and  through  the  Kaiser 
himself  being  a  Jew.  Mr.  Chesterton,  writing  of  the  Irish, 
caustically  remarks  that,  having  for  centuries  been  accused  of 
religious  fanaticism,  the}7  cannot  now  be  indicted  for  its  anti- 
thesis. Yet  in  Mr.  Chesterton's  own  organ,  The  New  Witness, 
the  most  paradoxical  accusations  against  the  Jew  find  Christian 
hospitality.  And  for  the  world  at  large,  although  it  is  as  the 
capitalist  that  the  Jew  has  been  abused  throughout  the  ages, 
there  has  been  no  difficulty  in  shifting  the  count  to  that  of 
Bolshevism  the  moment  a  more  malodorous  bogey  appeared  on 
the  scene.  Shylock  is  now  a  Socialist,  rabid  to  destroy  all 
property,  including  his  own.  And  it  is  only  the  other  day  that 
he  was  a  venomous  pro-German,  a  supporter  of  monarchistic 
militarism  and  Hun  atrocities. 

The  taste  for  thrills  and  the  Satanic  is  not  limited  to  the 
malevolent  and  the  vulgar.  It  victimises  even  the  benevolent 
and  the  intelligentsia.  Thus  we  find  in  Clemenceau's  account  of 
the  Jews  of  Busk  in  his  recently  published  volume,  "  Au  Pied  Du 
Sinai,"  the  observation :  "  The  Semite,  so  abhorred,  has  set 
out  to  conquer  the  world  into  which  the  dispersion  of  conquest 
threw  him.  Despised,  hated,  persecuted,  for  having  imposed 
on  us  Gods  of  his  blood,  he  has  wished  to  find  compensation  and 

190 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

culmination  in  the  domination  of  the  earth.  For  that  unheard- 
of  task,  no  pain  was  spared,  no  suffering  too  great,  no  torture 
counted,  no  revenge  was  disdained.  There  is  no  more  aston- 
ishing history." 

There  is  not,  indeed.  Clemenceau,  who  speaks  thus,  appears 
in  his  book  as  a  not  ungenial  Voltairean.  What  are  we  to 
expect  of  the  orthodox  mind?  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that 
after  centuries  of  scholarship  and  criticism,  the  deposit  left  in 
most  Gentile  brains  from  their  nursery  period  remains  as  crude 
and  childish  as  ever.  That  the  Old  Testament  preaches  a 
blood  and  iron  Jehovah  and  the  dominance  of  His  one  chosen 
people,  but  that,  though  every  word  of  it  is  true,  it  nevertheless 
leads  up  to  and  was  replaced  by  a  New  Testament,  with  quite 
opposite  teachings  and  a  God  of  universal  love,  who  even 
offered  Himself  (or  His  Son,  for  the  identities  are  somewhat 
confused)  as  atonement  for  the  sins  of  mankind,  that  this  God 
was  crucified  by  the  Jews,  and  that  they  were  ever  afterwards 
eternally  cursed  for  enabling  the  scheme  of  salvation  to  go 
through,  and  providentially  preserved  in  a  quaint  mixture  of 
obloquy  and  opulence  as  a  witness  to  its  truth  —  such  is  the 
farrago  which  still  constitutes  the  average  thought  of  Europe. 
Living  and  moving  and  having  their  being  in  such  a  conceptual 
chaos,  and  devoid  of  all  critical  power  or  historical  discern- 
ment, it  is  no  wonder  that  the  masses  remain  exposed  to  the 
wildest  delusions  on  all  other  subjects,  and  a  perpetual  prey 
to  political  adventurers.  The  worst  of  it  is  that  this  farrago 
is  only  the  travesty  of  great  tragic  historic  and  cosmic  truths, 
and  that  even  this  caricature  could  have  been  pragmatically 
beneficial,  had  it  been  seized  and  clung  to  in  its  moral  aspects  as 
whole-heartedly  as  in  its  mystic  and  melodramatic,  and  not  sur- 
rendered at  the  very  moment  when  it  could  have  been  valuable. 


Even  the  Blood  Accusation  —  an  obvious  refraction  of  the 
Crucifixion  story  —  persists  in  the  fuscous  mentality  of  the 
European  masses,  and  reaps  its  toll  of  Jewish  corpses  when- 
ever —  especially  at  Easter  —  a  Christian  child  is  missing  or  is 
kidnapped  ad  hoc  by  the  pogrom-confectors.  Presumably  the 
unfortunate  coincidence  of  Passover  and  its  curious  rites  with 
Easter  —  the  period  when  the  peasant-brain  is  full  of  the  Cru- 
cifixion —  supplies  the  latent  hate  and  distrust  with  a  specious 
framework.     There  is  a  pregnant  story  in  Shalom  Aleichem's 

191 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

book,  "  Jewish  Children,"  of  how  a  Jewish  and  Christian  child, 
who  have  gone  off  in  loving  companionship  to  revel  for  long 
hours  in  the  spring-tide  wood  together,  return  to  find  a  dreadful 
relief  in  the  village  Jewry  and  a  shame-faced  sullenness  among 
the  Greek-Church  peasantry  gathered  menacingly  round  the 
Jewish  house. 

Almost  the  exact  situation  is  reported  in  Tlie  Jewish  Chron- 
icle of  April  16,  1920: 

"  The  disappearance  of  three  Christian  boys  at  Pizdri,  near  Kal- 
ish  (Poland),  led  to  a  blood  accusation  panic  in  the  townlet.  De- 
spite the  protests  of  the  Rabbi,  who  declared  that  the  Jews  did  not 
require  Christian  blood  for  Passover,  the  Synagogues  and  the  resi- 
dences of  the  Rabbi,  Reader,  and  Beadle,  and  a  few  Jewish  notables 
were  searched.  In  the  meantime  a  large  crowd  gathered  in  the 
streets  and  threatened  to  massacre  Jews.  When  the  excitement  was 
at  its  height  the  missing  boys  returned  from  the  neighbouring  vil- 
lage, Toporova,  and  the  mob  dispersed."  The  same  item  adds  that 
"  a  blood  libel  trial  will  soon  take  place  at  Rowno  (a  town  in 
Ukraine  occupied  by  Polish  troops).  A  Jewess,  Golda  Giternian,  is 
accused  by  the  mother  of  a  missing  Christian  girl  of  having  killed 
her  daughter  for  ritual  purposes.  The  origin  of  the  charge  is  a 
statement  by  a  fortune-teller,  who  pointed  to  the  widow  Giterman 
as  the  author  of  a  ritual  crime.  The  police  are  favourably  inclined 
towards  the  blood  libel  theory." 

Last  June  a  Greek  girl  in  the  service  of  a  Jewish  merchant  at 
Constantinople  disappeared,  and  even  a  blood-stained  handker- 
chief of  hers  was  unearthed.  Fortunately  her  employer  found 
her  on  board  a  steamer  about  to  sail  and  brought  her  back, 
much  to  the  disconcertment  of  the  mob  rioting  round  his  house. 
Even  in  Palestine  the  ancient  accusation  has  been  attempted  for 
political  purposes.  In  the  middle  of  March,  1920,  murdered 
Arabs  were  found  in  cellars  in  the  Jewish  Colonies,  and  Chris- 
tian Arabs  set  up  the  cry  of  ritual  murder.  Fortunately  the 
real  murderers  were  found  by  the  police  before  the  massacres 
could  start.  This,  of  course,  did  not  prevent  the  massacres 
later  on,  though  another  pretext  had  to  be  found. 

In  his  Polish  Report,  Captain  Peter  Wright  says : 

"  There  is  a  general  belief  among  all  classes  of  Poles  that  the 
Jews  practise  ritual  murder;  for  this  there  exists  not  the  slightest 
evidence.  It  is  a  myth  and  an  improbable  myth.  For  orthodox 
Judaism  is  not  a  religion  of  mysterious  rites,  less  so  indeed  than 
Christianity,  but  a  highly  positive,  defined,  legal  religion.  But  I 
think  this  myth,  strongly  and  widely  believed  as  it  is,  is  the  reflec- 

192* 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

tion  that  this  antique  and  oriental  religion  casts  in  the  minds  of 
ordinary  men." 

It  is  not  Judaism  that  is  responsible  for  the  reflection,  but 
the  distorting  mirror  of  the  Polish  mind.1  And  if  "  all  classes 
of  Poles  "  refract  truth  so  atrociously,  it  is  not  astonishing  to 
read  that  a  mob  at  Cracow  recently  stormed  a  hospital  to  see 
the  Jewish  girl  of  ten  and  the  devil  adorned  with  horns  and  tail 
to  which  she  had  just  given  birth !  Some  peasants  thought 
Christ  had  just  been  killed ! 

Over  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago  the  first  edition  of  a  Hamp- 
stead  Jewish  Bazaar  Book  contained  a  facetious  line  in  the 
smallest  of  print  advertising  for  a  Christian  boy.  It  was 
thought  that  the  myth  was  so  hopelessly  mediaeval,  having  made 
no  appearance  in  England  since  the  Hugh  of  Lincoln  legend  in 
1255,  and  surviving  in  English  literature  only  in  Chaucer's 
"  Prioress's  Tale,"  published  a  century  later,  that  the  Jews 
could  now  afford  to  laugh  at  it.  More  prudent  heads  insisted 
that  the  whole  edition  must  be  cancelled.  And,  we  have  just 
seen,  they  were  absolutely  right.  As  Oscar  Wilde  said  to  me 
once:  "Stupidity  will  never  die."  This  mock  advertisement 
would  have  been  hailed  as  the  long-desired  avowal  of  the  abom- 
inable practice,  and  translated  into  every  European  language, 
and  in  Ghettos  of  Eastern  Europe  unknown  even  by  name  to  the 
mass  of  cultured  mankind,  thousands  would  have  agonised  and 
died  for  the  jest.  The  Beilis  case,  in  which  the  whole  pomp  and 
apparatus  of  Russian  law  was  brought  to  bear  in  proof  of  this 
very  accusation,  is  fresh  in  all  our  memories,  and  that  was 
twenty  years  later  than  the  penning  of  this  mock  advertise- 
ment. Nor  is  this  credulity  merely  the  mentality  of  the  masses. 
A  suspicion  that  the  Blood  Accusation  may  be  true  after  all 
lurks  —  like  the  suspicion  of  Jewish  world-designs  —  in  the 
most  enlightened  breasts.  Even  my  friend  Sir  James  Frazer, 
in  his  monumental  work  "  The  Golden  Bough,"  permits  himself 
the  conjecture,  partly  due  to  the  artist-scholar's  delight  in  all 
such  uncanny  rites,  that  there  may  have  been  some  smoke 
behind  all  this  fire.  And  in  a  volume  on  Thomas  of  Monmouth's 
"  Life  and  Miracles  of  St.  William  of  Norwich,"  published  by 
the  University  of  Cambridge,  edited  by  that  delightful  Canon 
Jessopp,  D.D.,  and  Montague  Rhodes  James,  Litt.D.,  Director 
of    the   Fitzwilliam    Museum,    these   learned    and    sympathetic 

1  The  papers  Wiarus  and  Illttstracya  have  published  pictures  of  Jewish 
ritual  murder! 

193 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

writers  could  not  forgo  an  analogous  allusion  to  the  possibility 
of  the  sainted  boy-martyr,  William,  having  actually  been  killed 
by  a  Jew,  and  not  accidentally  but  for  ritual  intent.  "We 
have  to  take  into  account,"  they  say,  "  the  possibilities  of  what 
a  mad  hatred  of  a  dominant  system,  or  a  reversion  to  half- 
forgotten  practices  of  a  darker  age,  might  effect  in  the  case  of 
an  ignorant  Jew  seven  centuries  back."  And  this  in  face  of  the 
knowledge  they  exhibit  that  similar  accusations  were  made 
against  Christians  by  Greeks  and  Romans,  against  heretical 
sects  by  Christians,  against  the  Knights  Templars  by  their  con- 
temporaries, and  even  in  our  own  day  against  Christian  mis- 
sionaries by  the  Chinese;  in  the  face  of  their  knowledge  that 
the  cult  of  boy-martyrs  brought  large  profits  to  the  shrines,  and 
that  all  these  slanders  against  the  Jews  were  the  deliberate  en- 
gines to  bring  about  their  expulsion  from  England,  as  the  slan- 
ders against  the  Templars  were  invented  to  prelude  the  pillag- 
ing of  their  wealth,  and  as  the  case  against  the  monasteries  was 
heavily  blackened  to  facilitate  their  confiscation. 

Wo  have  had  such  grandiose  lessons  in  public  lying  nowadays 
—  propaganda  the  wise  it  call  —  that  we  can  appreciate  bet- 
ter than  any  preceding  generation  that  boundless  credulity  of 
the  mass  mind  which  supplies  the  soil  for  any  desirable  legend. 
Indeed  our  psychologists  have  long  since  explained  to  us  that 
belief  is  the  automatic  result  of  any  vivid  impression,  not  con- 
tradicted at  the  moment  by  anything  else.  And  where  contra- 
diction is  unpopular,  or  even  treasonable,  whence  shall  it  be 
supplied?  Euclid  thought  that  when  he  had  said  "Which  is 
absurd,"  he  had  settled  the  matter;  but  the  absurdity  of  a  thing 
is  no  bar  to  belief  in  it.  Did  not,  indeed,  Tertullian  say: 
"  Certum  est  quia  impossibile  est"?  It  is  not  for  the  fact  be- 
hind the  myth  that  one  should  look,  but  to  the  brain  behind  it. 
When  the  Spectator  —  which  is  now  as  foolishly  perturbed  over 
the  legend  of  the  Conquering  Jew  —  many  years  ago  challenged 
me  to  explain  the  secular  persistence  of  the  Blood  Accusation 
if  there  was  nothing  at  all  in  it,  I  replied  that  I  was  not  an  au- 
thority on  Christum  psychology. 

Sir  Thomas  Browne  in  fact  got  hold  of  the  right  end  of  the 
stick  when  he  prefaced  his  "  Enquiries  into  Vulgar  and  Common 
Errors  "  by  remarking  that  "  The  First  and  Father-cause  of 
common  Error,  is,  The  Common  infirmity  of  Humane  Nature," 
by  attributing  the  second  cause  to  "  the  erroneous  disposition 
of  the  people,"  and  specifying  this  union  of  unintelligence  and 
bad  will  in  the  particular  forms  of  "  misapprehension,  fallacy, 

194 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

credulity,  infirmity,  adherence  unto  Antiquity,  Tradition  and 
Authority."  As  Mr.  Joseph  Jacobs  puts  it  luminously  in  his 
"  Jewish  Contributions  to  Civilisation,"  the  belief  in  the  badness 
of  the  Jews  can  vanish  only  like  the  belief  in  witches. 

It  behoves  anthropologists  to  be  very  sure  of  their  ground 
before  speculating  on  "  half-forgotten  practices  of  a  darker 
age."  There  are  no  half-forgotten  practices.  Judaism  has 
only  too  good  a  memory.  It  carried  forward  in  its  Talmud 
every  obiter  dictum  of  ancient  Rabbinism,  every  triviality  of 
ancient  ritual.  Of  all  the  accusations  against  the  Jews  this  is 
the  only  one  of  which  it  may  be  said  with  absolute  certainty 
that  it  has  not  the  minutest  shred  of  justification.  Yet  babes 
unborn  in  Ghettos  still  uncreated  are  not  improbably  destined 
to  be  torn  to  pieces  on  account  of  it. 

XI 

But  the  Blood  Accusation  has  become  too  grotesque  for  the 
more  cultured  anti-Semites  of  Western  lands ;  religious  perse- 
cution, too,  is  out  of  date:  hence  the  necessity  for  a  more  mod- 
ern legend  of  world-conquest  which  can  be  speciously  rooted  in 
the  old  Biblical  texts,  and  connected  with  the  newest  political 
movement.  To  the  semi-suppressed  Juda?ophobia  of  the  years 
of  peace,  the  liberating  jingoisms  of  the  war  provided  a  hell- 
born  opportunity  and  the  pretext  of  Bolshevism  has  proved  a 
Devil-send. 

For  Judasophobia,  on  a  well-known  Freudian  principle,  has 
to  find  reasons  for  the  hate  that  is  in  it ;  and  "  Christian  psy- 
chology," to  which  I  referred  the  Spectator,  is  steeped  in  that 
mistrust  and  repugnance  which  German  professors  have  tried  to 
generalise  and  disguise  as  "  Anti-Semitism."  Under  Jesuit  ed- 
ucation in  especial  the  young  Christian  mind  is  often  systemat- 
ically poisoned.  Witness  the  favourite  children's  book  "  Fleurs 
de  l'Histoire,"  with  its  teaching  that  the  Jew  is  compact  of 
"  treason,  roguery  and  lies." 

Sometimes,  indeed,  Anti-Semitism  produces  the  very  defects 
of  Jewish  character  which  it  professes  to  chastise  —  your  true 
vicious  circle.  It  is  saddening  to  say  —  after  the  honest  efforts 
of  noble-minded  Christians  to  give  the  Jew  the  favour  of  a  fair 
field  —  that  there  is  no  country  in  the  world  in  which  it  is  not 
a  disadvantage  to  be  a  Jew.  Max  Nordau  exaggerates  but  lit- 
tle in  asserting  that  a  Jew  must  be  three  times  as  clever  as  any 
other  man  to  win  equal  success  in  the  battle  of  life.     "  Justice 

195 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

for  the  Jew  "  has  never  yet  been  the  spontaneous  instinct  of  the 
masses  or  even  of  the  classes.  The  nations  have  been  hurried 
by  wise  legislators  into  codified  compassion  and  formulated  fair- 
dealing,  but  even  their  own  laws  have  not  completed  their  educa- 
tion. "  Liberty,  Equality  and  Fraternity  "  have  never  been 
more  than  a  glow  at  the  heart  of  the  great  and  a  formula  on 
the  lips  of  the  little.  Even  in  the  universities  of  Europe  — 
where,  if  anywhere,  sweetness  and  light  should  rule  —  the  most 
brilliant  Jew  lias  always  been  subtly  and  insidiously  handi- 
capped in  the  competition  for  fellowships  and  professorships. 
To-day  in  Germany,  Austria  and  Hungary  the  Jew's  complete 
exclusion,  even  Einstein's,  is  menacingly  demanded.  While  the 
Jew  is  not  free  from  social  prejudice  even  in  England  and  the 
United  States,  in  most  other  countries  he  lives  in  the  shadow  of 
a  volcano,  whose  eruptions  are  irregular  but  inevitable.  And 
like  many  other  diseases,  anti-Semitism  is  epidemic ;  it  flies  — 
and  with  no  fear  of  quarantine  —  from  one  country  to  another. 
Thus  Sweden,  which  in  the  eighteenth  century  sagaciously  in- 
vited Jews  to  come  in  and  help  it  to  prosper,  has  caught  the 
general  German  complaint. 

Whence  this  persistent  hostility  to  the  Jew?  Can  we  really 
trace  it  to  the  factor  propounded  by  Nietzsche  or  Clemenceau? 
But  —  and  the  evidence  has  been  collected  by  Mr.  Max  Radin 
—  it  is  found  in  the  old  Roman  writers  who  had  not  yet  heard 
of  the  obscure  incident  which,  according  to  Anatole  France, 
Pontius  Pilate  had  forgotten.  It  is  true  Judaism  had  prose- 
lytised with  considerable  success  in  the  classical  world,  and  this 
propagandist  activity  evoked  the  satire  of  Horace  and  Juvenal, 
and  the  alarm  of  Strabo  and  Seneca.  Hecataeus  of  Abdera,  a 
Greek  living  in  Egypt,  described  the  Mosaic  way  of  living  as 
"  inhospitable  and  inhuman,"  and  shortly  after,  Manetho,  an 
Egyptian  priest,  became  so  libellous  on  the  subject  of  Jews  that 
a  century  or  two  later  Josephus  took  occasion  to  answer  him  in 
the  course  of  his  reply  to  the  still  more  abusive  Apion. 

When  Cicero  defended  Flaccus,  ex-governor  of  Asia,  against 
the  charge,  inter  alia,  of  appropriating  the  shekels  collected  by 
provincial  Jews  for  Jerusalem,  the  great  advocate  complained 
of  the  crowd  of  Jews  in  the  court,  and  took  occasion  to  contrast 
their  rites  and  customs  contemptuously  with  those  of  Rome. 
We  see,  therefore,  that  Judrcophobia  has  its  roots  in  appre- 
hension of  alien  power,  especially  power  attached  to  a  somewhat 
mysterious  religion,  as  well  as  in  the  tyranny  of  majorities  and 
the  universal  dislike  for  the  unlike.     After  all,  a  race  that  keeps 

196 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

mainly  to  itself,  that  counts  by  a  different  calendar,  and  cele- 
brates a  different  series  of  festivals,  is,  when  it  lodges  itself  in 
other  political  organisms,  a  quasi-foreign  body,  and  human  na- 
ture being  what  it  is,  every  field  in  which  the  Jew  has  thus  estab- 
lished himself  becomes  a  battlefield,  with  persecution  as  the 
equivalent  for  the  fighting  which  is  for  every  other  people  the 
price  of  self-maintenance. 

Viewed  thus  philosophically,  Anti-Semitism  takes  its  place  in 
the  general  order,  though  the  fact  remains  that  the  struggle  by 
which  Israel  pays  for  survival  must  be  supplemented  by  the 
fighting  incumbent  upon  him  for  the  continuance  of  each  and 
every  Gentile  people  with  which  he  lives  in  symbiosis.  As, 
however,  he  is  nowhere  able  to  express  his  own  entity  as  com- 
pletely as  a  Gentile  people,  he  appears  to  get  an  inferior  article 
at  double  price.  The  only  compensation  is  the  diminished  risk 
of  extinction  that  comes  from  being  everywhere,  for,  as  the 
biologists  tell  us,  the  more  widely  disseminated  a  species,  the 
greater  the  chance  of  survival.  The  Jew  can  always  move  from 
an  unsafe  environment  to  a  relatively  safe,  though  this  advan- 
tage is  lessening  with  the  progress  of  steam,  petrol  and  elec- 
tricity, since  the  world  begins  to  wear  everywhere  the  same  face 
—  and  that  not  so  unlike  the  face  of  barbarism  as  these  tri- 
umphs of  civilisation  might  suggest.  In  so  far  as  this  antag- 
onism to  the  Jew  is  most  prevalent  in  Christian  countries,  it 
may  be  regarded  as  an  aspect  of  that  secular  resistance  of  the 
West  to  invasion  from  the  East,  which  culminated  in  the  ex- 
pulsion of  the  Moors  from  Spain,  possibly  even  it  is  a  subtle 
continuance  of  the  Punic  Wars ;  in  part  the  Gentile  aspect  of 
it  is  doubtless  a  survival  from  the  Dark  Ages,  still  fomented  by 
the  Christian  prayer-book  and  still  nourished  by  the  dictionary 
with  its  verb  "  to  Jew  "  (as  a  synonym  for  Christian  chousing). 
There  is  even  a  certain  physical  repugnance  to  the  Jewish  type. 
And,  indeed,  coarsened  sometimes  by  Moorish  blood,  high-liv- 
ing, lack  of  exercise,  or  the  intermarriage  of  uncouth  money- 
bags, it  can  be  unlovely  enough.  And  there  are  here  and  there 
psychical  expressions,  equally  forbidding,  not  least  the  frequent 
concealment  of  Jewish  origin.  The  prosperous  Jew  who  has 
shaken  off  the  culture  of  the  Ghetto  and  not  yet  taken  on  mod- 
ern culture  is  one  of  the  most  disagreeable  types  our  planet  has 
produced;  while  Pharisaism,  though  a  noble  religion,  is  pecul- 
iarly liable  to  those  perversions  against  which  Jesus  fulminated 
with  so  unchristian  but  so  human  a  wrath.  No  scientific  study 
of  anti-Semitism  can  leave  out  these  real  factors,  however  small 

197 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

their  percentage  in  the  compound,  which  owes  must  of  its  sub- 
stance to  commercial  competition,  industrial  jealousy  and  the 
pure  joy  of  malice. 

Instead  of  regarding  its  Jews  as  a  part  of  the  nation  and 
their  wealth  as  part  of  the  national  wealth,  every  nation  regards 
them  as  aliens  and  invasive  and  triumphant  rivals.  As  if  a 
country  were  a  huge  gambling  den  in  which  the  gains  of  some 
of  the  inhabitants  necessarily  meant  the  loss  of  all  the  others ! 
Even  in  America  —  that  conglomerate  of  peoples  —  this  dis- 
torted view  has  been  imported  by  its  European  constituents. 

"  It  is  for  his  virtues,  not  his  vices,  that  the  Jew  is  hated," 
maintained  Dr.  Herzl,  the  founder  of  modern  Zionism.  He  con- 
founded, perhaps,  "  struggle- for-life  "  virtues  with  real  moral 
virtues.  Yet  of  a  sooth  the  same  energy  and  push  and  busi- 
ness instinct  which  are  lauded  in  the  Anglo-Saxon,  the  Scots- 
man, or  the  American,  are  set  to  the  bad  in  the  Jew's  account. 
"  The  poor  Jew's  virtues,"  complains  Harold  Frederic,  a  sym- 
pathetic observer,  "  are  negative  and  unlovable."  The  Jew  is 
too  meek  and  sober.  The  world  prefers  dash  and  fisticuff's.  In 
short,  the  Jew  is  too  Christian. 

Burke  pointed  out  that  you  cannot  draw  an  indictment 
against  a  whole  people.  If  you  are  to  generalise  from  the  indi- 
vidual, there  is  no  crime  of  which  the  Jewish  people  cannot  be 
made  guilty ;  though  the  obverse  ascription  of  every  political 
virtue  is  strangely  neglected.  The  Jew  is  contrasted  not  with 
his  actual  neighbours  in  his  particular  social  stratum,  but  with 
an  idealised  Englishman,  Frenchman,  Teuton,  etc.  While  the 
Gentile  sees  his  own  people  perpendicularly  in  descending 
grades  of  character  and  wealth,  he  is  apt  to  see  the  Jewish  peo- 
ple horizontally.  It  is  as  if  one  should  draw  one's  notion  of  all 
Englishmen  from  Lord  Robert  Cecil  or  Crippen.  Fagin,  in 
"  Oliver  Twist,"  is  the  Jew.  But  what  Jew  ever  supposed  that 
Bill  Sikes  was  the  Englishman?  Long  before  Burke,  Sir 
Thomas  Browne,  refuting  "  the  popular  tenent  that  Jews 
stink,"  pointed  out  that  it  is  "  a  dangerous  point  to  annex  a 
constant  property  unto  any  nation."  Graetz,  the  Jewish  his- 
torian, ascribed  to  his  people  polarity,  or  the  quality  of  produc- 
ing mutually  opposite  phenomena.  But  in  truth  this  quality 
belongs  to  all  peoples.  Each  carries  in  its  bosom  contending 
forces,  as  the  party  system  alone  suffices  to  prove.  Burke's 
warning  should  have  been  enlarged  into  Sir  Thomas  Browne's. 
You  cannot  predicate  anything  at  all,  whether  good  or  bad, 
that  will  cover  a  whole  people.     There  will  always  be  individual 

198 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

exceptions.  Our  crude  generalisations  about  Prussia  doubt- 
less did  injustice  to  a  large  number  of  excellent  Prussian  paci- 
fists. A  neutral  who  strayed  into  the  artistic  cafe  of  Berlin  in 
the  middle  of  the  war  told  me  the  "  Bohemians  "  were  hoping 
Germany  would  lose  the  war  in  order  to  gain  her  own  soul. 
It  is  only  journalists  and  politicians  who  can  put  into  phe- 
nomena a  simplicity  which  is  not  there. 

If,  then,  one  cannot  make  all-inclusive  statements  about  any 
people,  how  must  this  impossibility  be  accentuated  with  a  peo- 
ple like  the  Jews,  who  have  not  even  a  territorial  unity,  but  are 
in  a  hundred  fragments,  each  exposed  to  a  different  political  en- 
vironment !  It  is  true  each  race  does  tend  to  yield  its  peculiar 
spiritual  fruits,  despite  varying  mHieucc;  one  can  express  a  peo- 
ple by  its  dominant  tendency,  as  well  as,  though  that  seems  par- 
adoxical, by  the  achievements  of  its  minority.  Just  as  a  book 
ranks  according  to  its  best  passages,  as  also  by  its  general 
level,  so  with  a  people.  It  receives  legitimately  the  prestige  of 
its  most  brilliant  sons,  and  is  gauged  likewise  by  its  average. 
The  range  of  a  people  is,  however,  considerably  wider  than  that 
of  a  book,  which,  if  by  a  respectable  writer,  is  hardly  likely  to 
sink  anywhere  into  imbecility  or  indecency,  whereas  it  is  almost  a 
Galtonian  law  that  an  excessive  deviation  to  the  right  of  a  peo- 
ple's norm  is  paid  for  by  an  equal  deviation  to  the  left. 

It  may  well  be  therefore  that  Jewry,  so  excessive  in  its  gifts 
and  misfortunes,  presents  extremes  equally  obnoxious  to  Gentile 
criticism,  that  the  exasperating  poverty  of  its  masses  is  bal- 
anced by  the  vexatious  opulence  of  its  plutocrats,  that  the  un- 
couth unworldliness  of  its  scholars  is  adjusted  by  the  over- 
shrewdness  of  its  commercial  classes  and  the  elegance  of  its  par- 
venu hostesses,  that  its  renegades  are  as  vulgar  as  its  Rabbis 
are  reactionary,  that  the  multitude  of  its  materialists  is  aggra- 
vated by  the  zealotry  of  its  fanatics,  and  that  its  tendency  to 
form  a  nation  within  a  nation  is  as  unpatriotic  as  the  cosmopol- 
itan outlook  it  contributes  to  the  Cabinets.  But  perhaps  the 
deepest  reason  of  anti-Semitism  is  simply  that  the  word  "  Jew  " 
exists.  Nothing  gratifies  the  mob  more  than  to  get  a  simple 
name  to  account  for  a  complex  phenomenon,  and  the  word 
"  Jew  "  is  always  at  hand  to  explain  the  never-absent  maladies 
of  the  body  politic ;  a  word,  moreover,  admirably  surcharged 
with  historic  hatred,  bigotry  and  repugnance.  The  countless 
noble  Jews  in  every  age  and  clime  do  not  seem  able  to  reach 
down  to  the  popular  consciousness.  Barney  Barnato  is  a 
proverb,  while  the  Baroness  de  Hirsch  passes  away  practically 

199 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

unnoticed.  The  exhaustless  munificence  and  impeccable  finan- 
cial reputation  of  the  Rothschilds  are  neutralised  by  the  rigour 
of  Isaac  Gordon,  the  multinominal  moneylender. 

"  Why  does  not  the  world  pick  out  Mr.  Mocatta  as  the  typ- 
ical Jew  instead  of  the  flaunting,  vaunting  type?  "  asked  the 
Jewish  Chronicle  in  the  obituary  panegyric  of  a  saintly  philan- 
thropist. "  Why  should  his  lack  of  ostentation  be  less  Jewish 
than  the  gaudy  showiness  of  some  other  Jew?  Why  should  not 
his  reserve,  his  modesty,  and  his  rectitude  be  regarded  as  typ- 
ically Jewish?  "  The  question  is  almost  an  Irish  bull.  Para- 
doxical ini])(isse!  Unless  the  Jew  shrieks,  "Walk  up!  Walk 
up  !  Behold  in  me  the  most  dignified  man  in  Creation,"  his  quiet 
dignity  must  go  unregarded. 

Again,  the  notion  that  Jews  form  an  alien  section  of  the  na- 
tion cannot  be  eradicated.  They  may  call  themselves  English- 
men, Frenchmen,  Germans,  and  Italians,  but  the  question  is,  not 
what  they  call  themselves,  but  what  Englishmen,  Frenchmen, 
Germans  and  Italians  call  them.  They  may  offer  body  and 
soul  to  their  country  for  generation  after  generation,  but  a 
Goldwin  Smith  will  arise  to  ask,  "  Can  Jews  be  patriots  ?  " 
And  every  now  and  then  every  nation  will  have  sudden  spasms 
of  pseudo-racial  self-concentration  —  Pan-Slavism,  Pan-Hel- 
lenism, and  other  panics  of  Pan-ism  demanding  the  immediate 
elimination  of  the  Jew.  Even  in  hybrid  Belgium  a  native  pol- 
itician explained  to  me  before  the  war  that  the  Jew  did  not  rep- 
resent "  true  Belgic  ideals."  And  this  in  Brussels,  where  two 
idioms  live  on  opposite  sides  of  the  same  street !  From  time  im- 
memorial Jews  have  dwelt  in  Algeria.  We  hear  of  them  in  the 
sixth  century  under  the  Visigothic  kings.  After  the  Spanish 
persecutions  of  1391  Algiers  was  a  great  centre  for  Jewish  ex- 
iles. Yet  the  parvenu  French  conquerors,  who  date  only  from 
1830,  have  persecuted  them  as  foreigners.  There  were  Jews  on 
the  banks  of  the  Rhine  in  the  reign  of  Justinian,  yet  they  are 
still  quasi-alien. 

The  conscious  pretexts  for  anti-Semitism  vary  historically  in 
every  country ;  they  may  all  be  reduced  to  one  simple  syllogism. 
P^very  country  has  Jews,  every  country  has  evils  ;  therefore  the 
Jews  are  the  cause  of  the  evils.  Such  is  the  crude  logic  of 
Demos  and  demagogues.  Even  the  better  politicians  like  a 
whipping-boy.  The  Jews  are  as  good  as  a  foreign  war  in 
averting  attention  from  domestic  troubles,  and  infinitely  more 
economical.  Is  it  profiteering  that  agitates  the  public?  It  is 
the  Jews  who  are  the  profiteers.     Is  it  the  menace  of  Bolshe- 

200 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

vism?  They  are  the  Bolshevists.  Is  it  the  hidden  hand? 
That  hand  wears  heavy  Jewish  rings.  Is  it  a  shortage  of 
houses?  It  is  the  Jews  who  have  monopolised  all  accommoda- 
tion. Is  it  a  dearth  of  bacon?  It  is  the  Jews  who  have  eaten 
it  up.  Is  it  the  awful  consequences  of  imperialistic  ambition? 
The  Kaiser  has  Jewish  blood.  If  there  were  no  Jews  they  would 
have  to  be  invented  for  the  use  of  politicians  —  they  are  in- 
dispensable, the  antithesis  of  a  panacea;  guaranteed  to  cause 
all  evils.  Is  it  any  wonder  that  the  aforesaid  Mr.  Mocatta  said 
in  a  presidential  address  to  the  Anglo-Jewish  Historical  So- 
ciety :  — 

"  The  lot  of  the  Jews  is  generally  as  sad  and  as  trying  as  it  was 
in  the  darkest  Middle  Ages.  They  seem  to  have  been  preserved,  not 
only  to  attest  the  continuity  of  the  Divine  love  and  the  majesty  of 
the  Law,  but  also  to  bear  the  sorrows  of  the  world  "  ? 

XII 

Two  recent  scurrilous  books,  "  Jewry  Ueber  Alles "  and 
"  The  Jewish  Peril,"  carry  in  their  titles  this  legend  of  the  con- 
quering Jew.  The  latter  work,  a  mass  of  mystical  nonsense 
translated  from  the  Russian  and  published  by  concerted  action 
in  various  languages  after  being  peddled  in  MS.  round  the 
Governments  of  Europe  and  America  by  notorious  Russian 
anti-Semites  as  though  it  were  a  precious  secret  document, 
though  it  had  already  appeared  in  print  in  1905,  professes  to 
reveal  "  the  secrets  of  the  Sanhedrim  " ;  but  the  tirades  against 
England  for  drawing  upon  the  support  of  the  "  Sanhedrim  "  in 
her  universal  intrigues  for  Empire  have  been  prudently  cut  out 
of  the  English  edition,  for  they  would  spoil  the  game.  (For 
cutting  out  the  whole,  £10,000  was  asked  !) 

There  is  no  Sanhedrin  now  extant,  no  "  Learned  Elders  of 
Zion  "  exist  whose  meetings  can  be  recorded  in  "  Protocols," 
and  "  Nilus  "  seeming  to  have  discovered  this  by  the  time  his 
book  reached  a  third  and  enlarged  edition  in  1911,  substituted 
for  his  original  melodramatic  mendacities  the  story  that  his 
documents  —  described  in  the  first  edition  as  stolen  from  French 
Freemasonry  —  were  simply  the  secret  reports  of  the  Zionist 
Congress  at  Basle  in  1897.  Unfortunately  for  "Nilus,"  I 
happened  to  be  at  all  the  sittings  of  that  Congress,  which  was 
the  first,  and  which  I  have  described  in  my  "  Dreamers  of  the 
Ghetto."     Nothing  could  be  less  like  the  operations  of  a  Jew- 

201 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ish  Jesuitry  than  this  gathering,  which  laid  the  foundations  of 
the  Zionist  movement  and  formulated  its  programme  as  "  the 
acquisition  of  a  publicly,  legally  recognised  home  for  the  Jew- 
ish people  in  Palestine."  As  this  was  an  absolutely  new  move- 
ment in  Jewry,  initiated  in  spite  of  great  public  opposition  by 
a  few  more  or  less  impecunious  publicists,  it  seems  indeed  a 
strange  manifestation  on  the  part  of  the  secret  Semitic  gang 
that  ran  —  and  runs  —  all  the  papers,  parliaments  and  banks 
of  the  world,  and  in  whose  iconoclastic  propaganda  Charles 
Darwin  was  a  prominent  puppet !  We  have  to  do  in  fact  with 
the  forgery  of  a  pious  Russian,  passionate  for  the  Church  and 
the  Czar,  edited  in  1905  by  an  agency  bent  on  drowning  the 
Revolution  of  that  year  in  Jewish  blood.  Such  forgeries  in- 
variably appear  in  troubled  periods,  they  are  a  stock  historical 
weapon;  though  rarely  has  a  forger  admitted  in  more  Irish 
fashion  than  the  author  of  "  The  Jewish  Peril  "  that  he  cannot 
prove  the  authenticity  of  his  documents,  for  —  he  gravely  ex- 
plains —  the  essence  of  this  criminal  plot  is  secrecy !  * 

It  was  like  the  journal  which  published  the  Pigott  forgeries 
to  take  this  grotesque  fabrication  seriously  and  thus  encourage 
Count  Reventlow  and  the  reactionary  monarchist  parties  in 
Germany,  in  whose  platform  anti-Semitism  is  a  plank.  Count 
Reventlow  solemnly  declared  that  he,  for  his  part,  had  never 
credited  the  report  that  Lord  Northcliffe  was  a  Jew.  The 
humourless  Fatherland  was  flooded  with  a  legend  of  a  Jewish 
combination  to  destroy  it,  in  which  the  gentle  and  venerable 
philanthropist,  Jacob  Schiff,  figured  side  by  side  with  Trotsky. 

But  it  is  impossible  for  even  The  Times  to  take  "  Nilus  "  seri- 
ously after  the  scathing  scholarship  of  Mr.  Lucien  Wolf,  who, 
in  a  letter  to  the  Spectator,  dissected  the  tangled  threads  of 
self-contradiction  and,  with  a  fascinating  erudition,  traced  back 
the  theory  of  the  all-destroying  Jew  to  the  literature  of  Anti- 
christ that  has  been  forged  in  successive  centuries  and  in  vari- 
ous blood-curdling  shapes  to  explain  the  Lutheran  Reforma- 
tion, the  Cromwellian  Revolution,  the  French  Revolution  and 

i  Salomon  Reinnch,  in  a  characteristically  learned  article,  points  out  that 
St.  Paul  himself  had  to  complain  of  apocryphal  letters  circulated  (presum- 
ably by  the  morning  post)  over  his  forged  signature,  that  a  fabricated  epis- 
tle'was  attributed  for  theological  purposes  to  Maui,  that  about  1610  a 
Polish  ex-Jesuit  drew  up  "  Monita  Sec  ret  a,"  imaginary  immoral  instructions 
to  the  disciples  of  St.  Ignatius,  which  same  useful  forgeries  were  after- 
wards exploited  by  Rome  against  the  Freemasons.  To  this  day  there  is  talk 
in  France  of  the  "  Palladists,"  a  horrible  sect  purely  invented  by  the  Polish 
ex-Jesuit,  but  the  heads  of  which  are  now  said  to  be  Jews!  (Xo  doubt 
there  are  also  Semitic  snarks  and   Hebrew  Boojums.) 

202 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

the  Revolutions  of  '48  as  all  due  to  that  same  Semitic  "  hidden 
hand."  The  latest  version  of  "  The  Jewish  Peril "  appears  to 
be  largely  a  plagiarism  from  the  earlier  fabrication  by  a  Ger- 
man named  Hermann  Goedsche,  who  had  actually  been  dis- 
missed from  the  Prussian  Postal  Service  for  forgery,  and  it  also 
borrows  considerably  from  the  pre-existing  literature  of  the 
great  Jewish  conspiracy,  e.g.,  Gougenot  des  Mousseaux's  "  Le 
Juif,  le  Judaisme  et  la  Judai'sation  des  Peuples  Chretiens." 

To  these  contemporary  forgeries  may  be  added  the  imaginary 
speech  of  a  Rabbi  of  Jaffa  promising  the  Jews  the  conquest  of 
the  world  (printed  by  Catholic  newspapers  in  Holland),  the 
letter  to  the  same  effect  found  in  the  pocket  of  a  dead  Bolshe- 
vist soldier,  the  utterance  of  the  late  Szamuely  annexing  Hun- 
gary as  a  Jewish  land,  the  deliberations  of  the  "  Workers  of 
Zion "  at  Kieff,  and  the  circular  recommending  Bolshevism 
"  disclosed  "  by  a  German  paper  as  sent  to  the  heads  of  the 
Alliance  Israelite  in  Russia  (a  country  where  no  branch  of  the 
Alliance  exists  or  is  permitted).  There  should  also  be  noted 
the  repetition  of  the  libel  on  Zionism  in  the  Brazol  "  revela- 
tions "  that  became  the  laughing-stock  of  America.  Brazol 
had  been  assistant  attorney  for  the  Russian  Government  in  the 
notorious  Beilis  case,  and  being  in  the  States  on  Russian  busi- 
ness, took  occasion  to  publish  a  work  with  twenty-five  apocry- 
phal resolutions  passed  by  an  imaginary  secret  sitting  of  the 
First  Basle  Congress.  Under  examination,  these  schemes  for 
the  Bolshevisation  of  the  world  were  found  to  be  merely  clumsy 
reproductions  of  existing  anti-Semitic  creations  in  Russian, 
German,  or  Rumanian.  All  these  forgeries  are,  however,  but 
the  expression  of  a  state  of  mind  in  the  public,  and  doubtless 
sometimes  in  the  forger  too,  who  feels  more  like  a  champion 
putting  his  truth  in  artistic  form  than  a  malicious  liar  and  a 
deliberate  cheat.  Hence,  the  danger  of  these  fictions  does  not 
evaporate  at  their  exposure,  for  the  public  credulity  that  in- 
spired them  persists  and  gives  the  breath  of  life  to  fresh  embodi- 
ments of  panic.  For  the  fear,  as  well  as  the  wish,  is  father  to 
the  thought.  Note,  as  Renan  said  to  Salomon  Reinach,  how 
uninventive  is  human  malignity.  "  Elle  tourne  eternellement 
dans  le  meme  cercle  d' 'accusations. "  And  the  ascription  of 
calamities  to  a  "  hidden  hand  "  already  hated  is  one  of  the  most 
familiar  workings  of  the  mass-mind. 

It  is  not  even  necessary  that  the  accusation  should  come  by 
the  complex  channel  of  forgery.  A  bouncing  assertion  suffices. 
Since  I  began  this  paper,  the  evidence  has  become  overwhelm- 

203 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ing  of  a  world-plot  worked  by  a  little  gang  of  exiles  from  Bol- 
shevist Russia  in  the  favourable  atmosphere  of  a  world-concor- 
dat of  sentiment  amongst  the  militarist  and  monarchical  classes 
of  all  countries,  fomented  by  the  chauvinisms  of  war,  and  find- 
ing vent  in  this  same  fantastic  charge.  According  to  the  Pres- 
ident of  the  Independent  Order  B'nai  B'rith,  a  circular  entitled 
"  Jewry  Ueber  Alles  "  has  been  sent  out  by  the  gang  "  to  Amer- 
ican publicists  and  men  of  affairs,  charging  the  Jew  with  the 
responsibility  for  the  world  war  and  with  a  vast  conspiracy  to 
control  the  economic  world,"  and  the  same  group  "  has  been 
distributing  throughout  the  American  Legion  posts  a  large 
amount  of  literature  of  the  same  general  nature,  urging  ex-sol- 
diers to  arm  themselves  against  *  the  Jewish  peril.'  "  The  lat- 
est manifestation  comes,  as  I  write,  to  lift  into  notoriety  the 
unknown  Dearborn  Independent,  the  personal  organ  of  Henry 
Ford,  the  car  manufacturer,  who,  after  visiting  Germany  in  a 
Peace  Ship,  turned  into  a  rabid  militarist  when  America's  own 
tocsin  sounded.  An  anonymous  article  in  this  journal,  en- 
titled "  Germany's  Reaction  Against  the  Jew,"  brings  the  case 
against  the  world's  whipping-boy  to  its  comic  culmination. 
For  it  declares  that  "  the  sole  winners  of  the  war  were  Jews." 
Early  in  the  war,  in  my  book,  "  The  War  for  the  World,"  I 
had  predicted  that  the  time  would  come  when  the  Jews  would  be 
gibbeted  as  its  sole  starters,  but  even  my  cynical  prescience  did 
not  foresee  that  they  would  grow  into  its  sole  winners.  Poor 
Jews,  whose  bones  bleach  on  every  battlefield  in  Europe,  Asia, 
and  Africa!  However,  the  Dearborn  Independent  deserves 
our  gratitude,  for,  in  reproducing  the  German  case,  it  naturally 
reproduces  the  factor  omitted  from  the  British  edition  of  "  The 
Jewish  Peril,"  and  England  reappears  as  the  Jew's  ally  or  tool 
in  the  conquest  of  the  world.  Pan-Judaea  — "  the  only  State 
exercising  world-government,  since  all  the  other  States  can  and 
may  exercise  national  government  only  " —  had  before  the  war 
its  Capital  in  London.  Strange  that  I  should  have  been  born 
in  this  city  and  lived  most  of  my  life  therein,  and  have  never 
heard  till  this  day  of  the  "  wonderfully  organised  All-Jewish 
Government "  whose  web  radiates  thence :  the  Government 
"  whose  fleet  is  the  British  fleet  which  guards  from  hindrance 
the  progress  of  All-Jewish  world-economy,"  and  in  return  for 
which,  "  Pan-Judaea  assures  Britain  an  undisturbed,  political 
and  territorial  world-rule,"  and  has  recently  "  added  Palestine 
to  British  control."  What  was  Tamburlaine  with  his  chariot 
drawn  by  bitted  and  harnessed  kings  to  His  Imperial  Majesty, 

204- 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Judseus,  who  "  is  willing  to  entrust  the  government  of  the  vari- 
ous strips  of  the  world  to  the  nationalistic  Governments,  and 
only  asks  to  control  the  Governments  "  ?  It  is  a  gesture  that 
would  have  left  even  Bcaconsfield  breathless.  This  marvellous 
Jewish  Super-Government  "  whose  citizens  are  unconditionally 
loyal,  wherever  they  may  be,  and  whether  rich  or  poor,"  and 
which  "  can  make  peace  or  war,  anarchy  or  order,"  at  its  own 
financial  will,  "  having  wreaked  its  revenge  on  anti-Semitic  Ger- 
many, will  now  go  forth  to  conquer  other  nations.  Britain  it 
already  has." 

Such  is  the  chivalry  of  Germany  to  its  Jews  who,  through 
Ballin  and  Rathenau,  did  more  than  any  other  section  of  its 
citizens  to  stave  off  the  disaster  which  its  fatuous  generals  and 
light-headed  admirals  brought  upon  it:  It  is,  of  course,  these 
same  monarchist  elements  that,  learning  and  forgetting  noth- 
ing, attribute  to  Jewish  intrigue  and  purpose  the  Revolution 
which  dethroned  Junkerdom,  and  that  see  in  their  own  inability 
to  effect  a  counter-revolution  the  infallible  evidence  of  the  "  hid- 
den hand."  Poor  Ballin,  one  remembers,  committed  suicide, 
unable  to  survive  the  literal  wreck  of  all  his  hopes  for  his  Fa- 
therland. But  in  the  Junker  version  he  apparently  shot  himself 
for  joy  at  the  revenge  he  had  helped  to  wreak  on  Germany ! 

To  those  who  know  that  the  Jews  are,  as  John  Davidson  once 
wrote  to  me,  "  a  race  of  ungovernable  individuals," —  still 
further  broken  up  by  geography  and  history  —  the  humour  of 
representing  them  as  an  army  of  ants  with  but  one  will  and 
purpose,  is  of  the  last  extravagance.  Travesty  can  no  further 
go.     It  is  the  very  sublime  of  the  ridiculous ! 

XIII 

The  clue  to  the  great  Jewish  conspiracy  is,  we  have  already 
seen,  to  be  sought  less  in  the  nature  of  the  accused  than  in  the 
psychology  of  the  accuser.  The  Jew  takes  on  the  Protean 
shapes  created  by  ever-changing  panic.  But  beneath  it  all  lies 
the  same  apprehension  of  mysterious  power,  of  uncanny  suc- 
cess, without  which  the  legend  of  the  advancing  conqueror 
would  lose  its  thrill.  And  this  power  in  the  last  resort  is 
money.  Not  to  be  exfurcated  even  by  the  charge  of  Bolshe- 
vism, lies  the  morbid  sense  of  the  Jew's  money.  It  is  by  the 
criminal  stigmata  of  f  .s.d.  that  the  Jew  will  be  known  when  the 
accusations  of  to-day  have  vanished  like  the  dew  of  the  morning. 

Yet  that  other  vision  of  the  Jew  as  an  invading  pauper  horde, 

205 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

a  mass  of  swarming  and  sweated  poverty,  is  the  truer,  though 
even  that  is  ironically  lurid  with  the  same  sinister  aura  of  suc- 
cess, since  is  not  the  wretched  Christian  pushed  out  by  the  He- 
brew coolie? 

Official  Russian  statistics  collected  by  Count  Pahlen's  com- 
mission at  the  beginning  of  the  century  showed  that  90  per  cent. 
of  the  Jews  in  the  Pale  had  no  staple  occupation  and  that  the 
average  possession  of  the  Russian  Jew  was  under  five  dollars. 
And  the  Russian  Jew  was  half  the  Jewish  race.  Of  the  three 
million  Jews  in  Poland  and  Galicia,  Sir  Stuart  Samuel  has  just 
reported  that  "  as  in  other  countries  the  large  majority  of  them 
are  very  poor,  suffering  severely  from  hunger  and  privation." 
Jerusalem  has  notoriously  been  a  hotbed  of  mendicity,  where  a 
tenth  of  a  penny  sufficed  to  evoke  a  beggar's  blessing.  Whence 
then  comes  the  singular  illusion  of  Jewish  wealth?  In  part  it 
is  the  magnifying  power  of  the  jaundiced  eye.  A  few  Jews 
have  always  loomed  golden  in  every  great  capital.  Two  Jews 
move  into  Park  Lane,  or  the  Faubourg  St.  Germain,  and  in  the 
resentment  at  their  intrusion,  it  is  forgotten  that  hundreds  of 
Christians  have  already  been  enjoying  for  generations  the  lux- 
ury and  privilege  of  those  abodes.  An  acute  Christian  ob- 
server remarked  to  me  that  in  the  East  End  of  London  a  dis- 
gruntled Tommy,  back  from  the  war,  passing  four  times  a  day, 
on  his  way  to  and  from  work,  a  shop  formerly  Gentile  but  now 
bearing  the  name  of  Isaacs,  has  the  impression  of  four  success- 
ful Hebrew  competitors. 

No,  the  Jewish  proletariat  is  not  a  money  success,  though  it 
succeeds  in  living  where  others  would  die,  because  it  has  had  for 
so  long  to  fight  artificial  disabilities  as  well  as  natural.  And 
the  power  of  surviving  among  hostile  conditions  means  the 
power  of  prospering  when  the  conditions  are  ameliorated.  It  is 
in  America  that  we  find  the  greatest  aggregation  of  Jewish  well- 
being,  for  here  the  conditions  have  been  peculiarly  favourable, 
though  even  here  there  are  no  Hebrew  names  vying  in  magnifi- 
cence with  those  of  Rockefeller,  Carnegie,  Astor  or  Pierpont 
Morgan.  The  manufacture  of  millionaires  from  nobodies, 
which  is  a  feature  of  American  life,  has  been  due  to  the  bound- 
less field  of  enterprise  and  to  the  conditions  of  social  equality 
which  prevail  in  the  States.  In  England  and  other  old  coun- 
tries a  certain  stratified  social  system  has  hitherto  kept  people 
born  in  the  ranks  strictly  to  their  own  station.  The  Euro- 
pean masses  have  generally  accepted  the  idea  that  they  were 
born  poor  and  must  remain  poor.     Farm-labourers,  factory- 

206 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

hands,  mechanics,  they  have  accepted  the  social  order  in  which 
they  have  found  themselves  as  unquestioningly  as  a  horse  re- 
ceives the  shafts  between  which  he  is  placed ;  and  European  so- 
ciety has  therefore  tended  to  reproduce  in  every  generation, 
with  some  small  variations,  the  grades  of  wealth  established  by 
a  traditional  history. 

"  Give  us,  Lord,  our  daily  rations, 
Bless  the  squire  and  his  relations," 

has  been  the  spirit  of  the  European  masses  over  centuries  now 
growing  legendary. 

The  Jew,  however,  standing  outside  the  Feudal  system  by 
which  Europe  was  organised,  was  able  to  escape  from  this  point 
of  view.  He  did  not  belong  to  the  lower  classes  for  the  simple 
reason  that  he  belonged  to  no  class  at  all.  He  thus  ignored 
the  general  notion  of  the  hierarchy  of  wealth,  and  had  the  au- 
dacity to  make  money  beyond  his  social  position. 

If  a  Barney  Barnato  could  rise  in  a  brief  generation  from 
Petticoat  Lane  to  Park  Lane  ( and  from  the  Lane  to  the  Lane 
represents  the  full  arc  of  the  social  pendulum),  if  an  Andrew 
Carnegie  could  develop  from  a  penniless  immigrant  into  a  benefi- 
cent millionaire,  it  can  only  be  because  the  conditions  are  anal- 
ogous. The  American  works  in  a  social  medium  really  free; 
the  Jew  in  a  medium  in  which  his  aloofness  makes  him  artifi- 
cially free.  While  America  is  the  land  of  adventure,  the  Jew 
is  the  man  of  adventure. 

But  even  in  America  the  conditions  are  now  Europeanising 
themselves.  As  Mr.  Stephen  Graham,  in  his  remarkable  ar- 
ticle, "  The  Spirit  of  America  after  the  War,"  puts  it,  in  the 
very  metaphor  of  my  explanation,  "  a  more  feudal  or  static 
state  of  business  has  set  in.  America  is  more  like  England  in 
this  respect.  Men  begin  to  be  in  that  state  of  life  to  which  it 
has  pleased  God  to  call  them."  And  millionaires,  even  amongst 
the  Jews,  are  few.  Most  Jewish  successes  must  be  considered 
moderate.  Indeed,  as  already  suggested,  all  Jewish  successes 
are  moderate  judged  by  the  modern  American  standards.  The 
successes  of  the  Americans  are  won  by  great  intellectual  com- 
binations. In  these,  paradoxically  enough,  the  Jew  does  not 
distinguish  himself.  He  prefers  to  build  up  his  property  by  an 
endless  aggregation  of  the  infinitely  little.  He  grows  rich  like 
Alnaschar  in  the  "  Arabian  Nights,"  who  started  with  a  bas- 
ket of  glass ;  except  that  the  Arab's  dream  is  the  Jew's  reality. 

207 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

With  the  returns  from  the  glass  he  buys  something  larger,  and 
goes  on  and  on  by  petty  stages  till  he  ends  in  the  palace  with 
the  slaves  and  concubines  of  the  Oriental  vision.  And  before 
kicking  he  waits  till  he  has  got  whom  to  kick,  unlike  the  poor 
day-dreamer  in  the  story  who  kicks  over  the  basket  and  shatters 
his  glass  and  his  hopes. 

The  characteristic  habit  of  accumulating  possibly  accounts 
for  the  fact  that  in  Jewry  the  men  with  ideas  have  no  money, 
and  the  men  with  money  no  ideas.  This  was  strongly  brought 
out  in  the  Zionist  movement.  The  millionaires  who  might  have 
been  suspected  of  large  ideas  and  the  habit  of  grandiose  com- 
binations were  discovered  to  be  of  microscopic  outlook,  while 
the  imaginative  combinations  and  even  the  practical  organisa- 
tions were  made  by  men  of  letters  and  science.  Men  who  have 
gone  cautiously  adding  field  to  field  for  their  own  advantage 
are  not  easily  able  to  conceive  of  the  acquisition  of  a  country 
for  the  general  good.  Even  Baron  Hirsch  could  only  conceive 
of  an  Israel  redeemed  by  being  broken  into  still  smaller  frag- 
ments, while  Baron  Edmond  de  Rothschild  began  his  epoch- 
making  work  in  Palestine  merely  as  a  philanthropist. 

Generally  speaking,  the  man  who  has  accumulated  a  fortune 
through  years  of  toiling  and  moiling,  his  initial  capital  labori- 
ously saved,  the  man  of  this  sober  temperament  is  naturally 
not  the  kind  to  risk  past  and  future  on  a  grand  coup.  It 
should  be  added  that  the  Jew's  cautiousness  is  likewise  probably 
due  to  uneasiness  and  insecurity.  He  would  not  dare  adven- 
ture himself  in  political  complications,  or  in  syndicate  opera- 
tions, notoriously  opposed  to  the  general  interest.  It  may 
seem  a  contradiction  to  the  contention  that  the  Jews  appear  to 
amass  riches  not  by  coups  but  by  the  steady  accumulation  of 
small  profits,  that  the  Stock  Exchanges  of  the  world  bristle 
with  Jews.  But  that  the  stockbroker  is  a  speculator  by  grand 
coups  is  a  popular  delusion.  The  stockbroker  is  just  the  per- 
son who  does  not  speculate  at  all ;  he  accumulates  his  fortune 
by  petty  brokerage  on  the  large  and  never-ending  transactions 
of  other  people.  Certainly  there  are  Jewish  operators  on 
'Change  in  the  gambling  sense,  but  I  am  not  aware  that  they 
have  ever  controlled  the  market  with  sovereign  power.  On  the 
gambling-table  of  the  Veldt,  Barney  Barnato  was  beaten  by 
Rhodes  at  the  game  of  diamond  cut  diamond. 

This  power  of  achieving  moderate  successes,  of  building  up 
gradual  aggregates,  indicates  just  the  kind  of  financial  talent 
which  we  should  expect  to  have  been  developed  by  the  unhappy 

208 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

history  of  the  race.  When  the  Jews  were  in  their  own  land 
they  left  commerce  to  the  Phoenicians.  These  Philistines  it 
was  who  developed  the  great  ports  of  Tyre  and  Sidon.  But  al- 
though enterprising  Jews  had  always  followed  in  the  wake  of 
commerce,  and  were  dotted  about  the  shores  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean even  before  Titus  took  Jerusalem,  the  people  as  a  whole 
remained,  as  Josephus  testifies,  a  pastoral,  agricultural,  and 
military  race.  With  the  destruction  of  their  centre  came  their 
almost  total  transformation  into  a  commercial  and  industrial 
people,  and  it  is  curious  to  find  that  by  the  twelfth  century 
Tyre  itself  held  Jewish  shipowners  and  manufacturers  of  Ty- 
rian  glass.  And  not  only  did  they  change  their  economic 
status,  but  post-Palestinian  history  forced  them  to  be  middle- 
men in  every  department.  In  the  Dark  Ages,  and  in  those 
countries  where  the  Dark  Ages  still  reign,  we  find  the  Jew 
largely  employed  as  a  middleman  between  landlords  and  ten- 
ants, or  as  farmer  of  taxes  between  people  and  princes,  between 
noblemen  and  serfs,  often  between  Church  and  tithe-payer. 
The  Jew  of  Poland,  Hungary,  Germany  and  Bohemia  was  the 
middleman  whose  duty  it  was  to  collect,  to  force  the  utmost 
out  of  an  unwilling  population.  The  profit  was  not  to  the  Jew, 
but  to  the  power  behind  the  Jew.  When  Dickens  in  "  Our  Mu- 
tual Friend,"  figured  his  good  Jew,  Uriah,  as  the  thumb-screw 
of  a  hidden  Christian  employer,  Dickens  was  true  to  history, 
however  far  from  true  Jewish  psychology  the  rest  of  the  char- 
acter may  be. 

Now,  a  nation  of  middlemen  cannot  yield  great  originative 
conceptions  in  economics.  Just  as  intellectually  the  mediasval 
Jew  found  his  function  in  translating  and  interpreting  one  na- 
tion to  another  —  a  role  he  still  largely  monopolises  —  so  did 
he  find  his  chief  economic  function  in  linking  the  scattered  na- 
tions through  the  medium  of  "  the  foreign  exchanges."  In  a 
well-known  passage  of  the  Spectator  Addison  describes  the  Jews 
as  "  so  disseminated  through  all  the  trading  parts  of  the 
world,  that  they  are  become  the  instruments  by  which  the  most 
distant  nations  converse  with  one  another,  and  by  which  man- 
kind are  knit  together  in  a  general  correspondence.  They  arc 
like  the  pegs  and  nails  in  a  great  building,  which,  although  they 
are  but  little  valued  in  themselves,  are  absolutely  necessary  to 
keep  the  whole  frame  together." 

And  certainly  in  the  ages  ere  nations  understood  one  another 
and  one  another's  language  and  currency,  and  when  they  were, 
moreover,  mutually  suspicious  and  hostile,  the  value  of  a  uni- 

209 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

versally  dispersed  fraternity  as  a  link  between  the  nations  can- 
not he  overrated.  The  Jew's  operations  as  a  middleman  were 
facilitated  by  his  polyglot  capacity  and  by  his  possession  of 
Hebrew  or  Yiddish,  or  Ladino  (Spanish- Jewish),  which  made  a 
common  tongue  for  communities  otherwise  separated  by  space 
and  local  nationality.  The  absence  of  a  country  of  their  own, 
which  was  the  cause  of  the  existence  of  this  diffused  brother- 
hood, was  also  a  factor  forcing  them  into  international  deal- 
ings ;  in  many  countries  of  the  Exile  they  were  exclusively  to 
be  found  in  towns,  not  being  allowed  either  to  own  or  work  land, 
and  even  had  property  in  land  been  permitted  them,  the  inse- 
curity of  tenure  made  it  an  undesirable  form  of  property.  For 
those  in  danger  of  banishment  at  brief  notice  possessions  must 
be  portable.  Hence  they  preferred  to  deal  in  money  and  with 
precious  jewels  of  small  bulk.  Armed  with  mutual  interest  and 
confidence,  the  Jews  wove  a  network  of  commerce  over  the  isles 
of  the  sea.  An  Arab  geographer  of  the  ninth  century  gives  the 
name  of  Radanites  to  the  Jewish  merchants  who  carried  goods 
and  slaves  between  Europe  and  the  East. 

All  these  remarks,  however,  refer  to  that  efficient  minority 
which  was  able  to  raise  itself  from  the  mass  and  which  alone  rep- 
resented Jewry  in  the  eyes  of  Christendom.  But  although,  for 
example,  every  Polish  nobleman  had  his  Jewish  factor,  that  did 
not  enrich  the  mass  of  the  Jews  on  his  estate,  who,  on  the  con- 
trary, were  mulcted  by  his  Jewish  agent.  And  if  the  Jew,  by 
not  living  the  life  of  the  nations,  but  living  in  a  Biblical  dream- 
world of  his  own,  escaped  the  feudal  point  of  view  with  its 
dispiriting  consequences  on  the  fortunes  of  the  lower  classes, 
this  peculiar  aloofness  prevented  the  dreamier  section  from  ever 
facing  the  realities  of  life.  A  class  of  beggar-students  and  rab- 
bis and  nondescript  Bohemians  was  evolved,  who  still  haunt  the 
Ghettos  of  the  world  from  New  York  to  Jerusalem.  "  Luft- 
menschen  "  Xordau  has  ingeniously  styled  these  airy  tribes  who 
look  to  miracles  for  their  daily  food,  and  scan  the  horizon  for 
provision-bearing  ravens.  No  people  in  the  world  possesses  so 
many  fantastic  ne'er-do-wells  as  this  nation  mythically  synony- 
mous with  success.  Nor  does  any  people  possess  so  many  indi- 
viduals indifferent  to  moncymaking.  General  Booth  expressed 
his  surprise  at  finding  in  Sir  Matthew  Nathan,  then  the  Gov- 
ernor of  Natal,  a  man  so  markedly  different  in  his  view  of 
money  from  the  bulk  of  British  officialdom.  It  is  rather  odd 
that  a  supposed  anti-Semite  like  Mr.  Belloc  should  have  re- 
cently ripped  up  the  fable  of  Jewish  wealth  and  monev-grab- 

210 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

bing.  "  Jews  as  a  mass,"  he  pointed  out,  "  were  a  very  poor 
race,  because  the  making  of  money  was  not  their  principal  ob- 
ject." This  is  the  truth.  Shylock  himself  preferred  a  pound 
of  inedible  flesh  to  thrice  his  three  thousand  ducats  offered  in 
court. 

One  of  our  most  distinguished  Christian  law-lords  once  de- 
clared to  me  that  the  few  persons  he  had  known  in  his  life  who 
followed  science,  learning,  art,  or  literature  with  uncommercial 
devotion  were  all  Jews.  And  indeed  of  the  three  great  Anglo- 
Jewish  contributions  to  the  work  of  the  war  —  the  camouflage 
system  of  Solomon  J.  Solomon,  R.A.,  the  tank  of  Sir  Albert 
Stern,  and  the  anti-gas  fan  of  Mrs.  Ayrton,  all  alike  were 
marked  by  a  disinterested  and  almost  despairing  anxiety  to  con- 
vert a  slower-brained  race  to  faith  in  science. 

The  traditional  relation  of  the  Jew  to  the  credit  system, 
which,  according  to  Sombart,  he  invented,  is  vastly  exaggerated. 
In  his  valuable  posthumous  book,  "  Jewish  Contributions  to  Civ- 
ilisation," Joseph  Jacobs  carefully  summed  up  the  evidence,  and 
there  is  none  of  any  Jewish  participation  in  its  sixteenth  cen- 
tury beginnings,  which  are  due  to  Italians  and  Germans.  The 
credit  system  was  such  a  creation  of  genius,  and  Capitalism  has 
in  its  day  proved  so  fruitful  an  agency  of  civilisation  and  inter- 
national unification,  that  it  is  only  my  stern  sense  of  justice  that 
refuses  to  accept  the  fabular  version.  The  Jew  did  indeed  help 
to  transform  the  economics  of  Europe  from  a  barter  to  a  money 
system,  for  being,  as  I  have  just  pointed  out,  forbidden  to  hold 
immovable  property,  he  was  the  only  man  whose  wealth  was  in  a 
wandering  shape.  But  in  so  far  as  credit  in  the  embryonic  form 
of  money-lending  is  concerned,  he  had  not  even  the  merit  of  suc- 
cessful competition  in  this  matter,  since  the  Church's  interpre- 
tation of  Luke  vi.  35,  prohibited  Christendom  from  lending 
money  at  interest,  and  it  was  therefore  Jewish  money  that  had 
to  build  the  great  churches  and  abbeys  of  England,  to  finance 
Columbus's  discovery  of  America  or  Strongbow's  conquest  of 
Ireland.  The  Jew  was  thus  a  precious,  if  paradoxical,  asset  in 
Christendom,  a  royal  chattel  rather  than  a  citizen,  a  sponge  to 
be  squeezed  by  the  King,  to  whom  all  the  usurer's  money  es- 
cheated on  his  death  —  and  one  sees  how  inconvenient  it  was  if 
the  sponge  dipped  itself  in  holy  water.  Poor  William  Rufus 
had  to  bribe  baptised  Jews  to  return  to  their  Judaism. 

Being  a  Jew  was  thus  a  dangerous  occupation  from  which 
there  was  no  escape.  It  was  dangerous  because  there  is  no 
bigotry  like  that  of  defalcating  creditors,  whose  debts  can  be 

211 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

wiped  out  by  wiping  out  the  debtor,  and  to  be  anything  but  a 
financial  middleman  was  not  easy  in  a  society  where  labour  was 
organised  by  guilds,  from  which  the  Jew  —  if  only  because  un- 
able to  take  the  oaths  of  initiation  —  was  excluded.  In  Spain 
under  the  Moors  he  had  his  own  guilds,  but  under  mediaeval 
Christendom,  especially  after  the  Crusades,  he  was  driven  from 
all  crafts,  and  even  from  commerce.  It  was  fortunate  for  him 
that  he  was  not  alone  in  his  inglorious  pursuit  of  interest,  that 
the  Flemings,  Lombards  and  Florentines  had  begun  to  take  a 
hand  in  money-lending  —  the  financier,  as  Pinero  says,  is  only 
a  pawnbroker  with  imagination  —  and  that  the  Church  finally 
accommodated  itself  to  this  text  of  Luke  as  it  had  long  since 
done  to  the  still  more  difficult  beginning  of  the  same  verse, 
"  Love  ye  your  enemies."  It  was  fortunate,  too,  for  the  Jew 
that  he  did  contrive  to  amass  some  wealth,  because  that  was  as 
important  to  him  for  self-defence  as  strength  to  the  lion  or 
swiftness  to  the  hare. 

The  "  sinews  of  war  "  supplied  the  place  of  an  army. 

XIV 

My  friend  and  co-worker,  the  late  Sir  Lionel  Abrahams,  laid 
it  down  in  his  last  presidential  address  to  the  Jewish  Historical 
Society  of  England,  that  "  Jewish  financial  genius  does  not 
exist,  and  Jews  have  attained  as  a  whole  comparatively  little  in 
the  way  of  financial  and  economic  eminence."  This  is,  perhaps, 
to  exaggerate  on  the  other  side,  and  to  ignore  his  own  genius  as 
Indian  Financial  Secretary,  to  which  Lord  Inchcape  and  other 
experts  have  paid  tribute.  Financial  supermen  are  undoubt- 
edly to  be  found  among  the  Jews  of  all  countries.  But  he  is 
certainly  right  in  tracing  the  source  of  the  exceptional  riches 
of  the  Jew  to  the  fact  that  the  wealth  he  amassed  was  in  coin, 
that  almost  alone  in  the  Middle  Ages  the  Jew  had  property  in 
the  shape  of  money.  Citing  an  ancient  document  of  inquiry 
into  the  movables  possessed  by  the  inhabitants  of  Colchester  in 
1301,  Sir  Lionel  Abrahams  tells  us  that  of  the  three  hundred 
and  ninety  inhabitants  examined,  only  ten  were  found  to  pos- 
sess any  money,  and  the  largest  sum  found  was  two  marks  (£1, 
6s.  8d.).  Similarly  tenants  paid  the  lord  of  the  manor  mainly 
in  work,  cows,  or  poultry.  The  nobleman's  wealth  being  in 
lands  or  villeins,  or  the  merchant's  in  goods  or  ships,  was  not 
fluid.  It  was  thus  that  the  Gentile  had  to  "  go  to  the  Jews  "  in 
any  crisis  demanding  metallic  money,  or  securities  for  money, 

212 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

though  for  example  Shylock's  wealth  in  ducats  was  probably  in- 
ferior to  Antonio's  in  argosies.  Hence  the  delusion  from  which 
the  world  still  suffers.  It  was  because  there  was  no  readily 
available  substitute  for  the  Jews  as  financiers  that  their  expul- 
sion from  England  in  1290  curiously  led  —  as  Dr.  Stokes  has 
pointed  out  —  to  the  political  freedom  of  this  country.  The 
need  of  ready  money  was  constantly  involving  the  monarchy 
in  friction  with  Parliament  and  people,  till  at  last  Ship-money 
brought  about  its  fall.  The  Republic  in  its  turn  brought  back 
the  Jews,  Cromwell  understanding  their  commercial  importance 
for  his  expansionist  policy.  But  it  was  in  the  Elizabethan  age, 
when  the  Jews  in  England  were  like  the  snakes  in  Iceland,  that 
England  began  to  lay  the  foundations  of  this  policy  and  to 
enter  what  Seeley  has  called  "  the  main  current  of  its  com- 
merce." And  though  undoubtedly  Jewish  finance  and  genius 
have  played  no  small  part  in  the  establishment  of  the  mightiest 
Empire  the  world  has  ever  seen,  especially,  as  Mr.  Max  J. 
Kohler  has  shown,  by  keeping  its  early  colonies  from  bank- 
ruptcy, yet  to  ascribe  its  development,  or  that  of  the  modern 
world  in  general,  to  a  capitalistic  system  predominantly  worked 
by  Jews,  could  occur  only  to  the  anti-Semite  or  the  myth- 
monger. 

If  "  rich  as  a  Jew  "  has  become  a  popular  proverb,  it  is  be- 
cause the  only  Jews  with  whom  the  Christian  needed  to  come 
into  contact  were  the  wealthy  minority  who  financed  everything, 
including  (by  way  of  the  Crusades)  their  own  persecutions.  A 
cockney  diner-out  in  restaurants  might  as  well  have  imagined 
that  all  foreigners  were  waiters.  And  the  locution  — "  to  go  to 
the  Jews  " —  survived  into  the  period  when  money  had  become 
general  and  money-lending  had  been  thrown  open  to  Christian 
competition.  Had  my  Lord  Tomnoddy  of  the  Ingoldsby  Leg- 
end "  gone  to  the  Jews  "  in  the  literal  sense  of  the  phrase,  he 
would  have  found  himself  among  the  poorest  inhabitants  of  the 
most  congested  slums  in  Europe. 

XV 

But  the  myth  of  the  Jewish  accumulation  of  power  in  the 
shape  of  capital  does  not  constitute  the  real  danger  to  the  Jew 
or  the  real  indictment.  Clemenceau,  though  under  the  sway  of 
the  myth,  yet  refers  wittily  to  "  Venorme  puissance  d'Israel  dans 
le  christianisme  capitaliste  de  nos  jours."  Christendom  is  too 
tainted  with  capitalism  to  accuse  the  Jew  of  it.     It  is  not  cap- 

213 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

italism  for  profit's  sake  that  the  world  rebukes  and  dreads.  It 
is  capitalism  for  Jewry's  sake.     The  Jew  bankers  of  the  world 

—  that  notorious  intercatenation  of  super-moneylenders  —  are 
engaged  in  the  old  Biblical  business  of  exploiting  the  rest  of 
mankind  as  the  prelude  to  its  extermination.  I  suppose  nobody 
is  in  a  better  position  than  I  to  give  the  lie  to  the  charge  of 
Jewish  solidarity,  I,  whose  life  has  been  half-wasted  in  the  effort 
to  bring  it  about,  who  for  twenty  years  toiled  to  unite  the 
Jewish  millionaires  in  the  quest  for  a  Jewish  State,  and  whose 
supremest  triumph  lay  in  assembling  three  of  them,  a  British, 
a  Russian  and  an  American,  in  one  committee-room  to  promote 

—  emigration  from  a  Jewish  centre ! 

Undoubtedly  there  are  Rothschilds  in  London,  and  in  Paris, 
and  in  Vienna,  and  perhaps  still  in  Frankfort.  But  the  fantas- 
tic idea  that  this  concatenation  of  cousins  holds  the  purse- 
strings  of  the  world  and  is  ready  to  plunge  it  into  war  without 
a  qualm,  so  that  it  may  finance  the  whirlwind  and  capitalise  the 
storm,  is  —  though  it  lurks  in  the  closing  allusion  of  Sir  Charles 
Bruce  and  was  actually  propounded  in  my  hearing  by  one  of 
our  most  Liberal  men  of  letters  —  only  to  be  taken  seriously 
because  its  effects  are  serious.  One  would  have  imagined  that 
the  discovery  in  the  Kaiser's  archives  of  a  letter  from  the  late 
Alfred  de  Rothschild  pleading  desperately  for  the  peace  of  Eu- 
rope would  have  given  the  quietus  to  this  myth.  I  well  remem- 
ber how  astonished  Ur.  Herzl  -was  at  discovering  —  when  he 
tried  to  engage  them  in  Zionism  —  within  what  a  rigid  ambit 
the  Rothschilds  dared  move  of  their  own  initiative,  how  circum- 
scribed they  felt  themselves  by  the  will  of  the  Powers,  how  chau- 
vinistically  each  branch  of  the  cousinship  responded  to  its  local 
Jingoism.  Nor  were  they  all  so  united.  The  late  Lord  Roths- 
child himself  told  me  sardonically  how  little  one  of  his  Conti- 
nental cousins  could  be  relied  upon  in  a  Jewish  cause.  "  Use- 
less to  ask  him  to  contribute.  What  you  would  get  wouldn't 
pay  the  cost  of  cleaning  your  boots  after  the  journey." 

As  for  the  Press  being  in  the  hands  of  the  Jews,  let  us 
bring  this  question,  too,  into  the  open.  There  comes  to  my 
mind  a  recollection  of  a  conversation  with  the  late  Leopold 
de  Rothschild  at  a  moment  when  The  Times  was  in  low  water 
and  in  the  market,  and  had  been  offered  to  New  Court.  There 
is  no  organ  which  it  would  be  more  important  to  have  in  Jewish 
hands,  whether  for  the  mythical  aggressive  or  for  purely  de- 
fensive purposes.  Yet  what  was  the  temptation  that  appealed 
to  the  Rothschilds  ?     "  A  paper  which  will  put  in  a  letter,  if 

214 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

decently  written,  upon  any  subject  from  any  standpoint,"  cried 
Mr.  Leopold  enthusiastically,  "  is  not  that  a  national  British 
asset?  And  is  not  such  an  asset  worth  preserving?  "  I  agreed. 
Since  those  days  The  Times  has  sunk  from  a  national  to  an  in- 
dividual organ,  and  rarely  publishes  a  letter  not  parasitic  to  its 
policies.  But  only  to-day  has  the  significance  of  that  conversa- 
tion occurred  to  me. 

The  Rothschilds  with  open  eyes  allowed  the  most  influential 
organ  in  the  world  to  go  to  Lord  Northcliffe,  and  thus  ulti- 
mately to  fall  into  the  hands  of  an  anti-Semitic  editor.  A 
quaint  way  indeed  of  conducting  a  world-plot !  I  know  only 
two  daily  papers  in  London  of  Jewish  editorship  or  proprietor- 
ship, the  Daily  Express  and  the  Daily  Telegraph,  and  it  is  dif- 
ficult to  decide  which  is  the  more  radically  British.  Emma 
Lazarus  felicitously  compared  the  Jew  in  every  country  to  the 
intensitive  form  of  the  Hebrew  verb,  and  the  comparison  finds 
illustration  everywhere.  The  very  suspicion  that  would  attach 
to  a  Jewish  paper,  did  it  favour  Jews  or  Judaism,  tends  rather 
to  drive  it  into  injustice  or  anti-Semitism,  and  Lord  Burnham's 
success  in  avoiding  both  is  a  remarkable  feat.  Dr.  Herzl  was 
one  of  the  editors  of  the  Neue  Freie  Presse  of  Vienna,  and  its 
most  brilliant  feuilletonist,  yet  never  while  he  lived  was  a  word 
about  the  Zionist  movement  allowed  to  appear  in  this  powerful 
organ,  which  was  soon  alone  in  Europe  in  boycotting  the  theme. 

By  a  strange  coincidence  I  had  barely  written  this  paragraph 
when  I  saw  that  Herr  Moritz  Benedikt,  the  proprietor  and  edi- 
tor-in-chief of  the  Neue  Freie  Presse,  was  just  dead  in  Vienna  at 
the  age  of  seventy !  "  Benedikt,"  I  was  informed  by  The  Times 
correspondent,  "  more  than  any  other  man,  was  responsible  for 
the  downfall  of  Austria."  This  may  be  quite  true,  for  we  know 
the  fatal  power  of  a  country's  leading  organ,  but  I  feel  sure  this 
sinister  potency  would  not  have  been  ascribed  to  him  had  he  not 
been  of  the  fabular  race.  But  what  policy  was  it  that  he  incor- 
porated? It  was,  says  The  Times,  "Jewish  Pan-Germanism." 
Now  Pan-Germanism  we  have  heard  of.  But  Jewish  Pan-Ger- 
manism is  simply  a  meaningless  collocation  of  words.  Unless, 
indeed,  it  means  —  in  the  sense  of  Emma  Lazarus  —  an  intensive 
Pan-Germanism,  and  in  that  sense  it  is  not  easy  to  see  how  it 
could  conduce  to  Jewish  ends.  "  He  never  forgave  England," 
we  read,  "  for  escaping  from  the  orbit  of  German  foreign  pol- 
icy." Evidently,  then,  not  even  England's  promise  to  establish 
"  a  national  home  for  the  Jewish  people  in  Palestine  "  could 
soften  this  rancorous  Teutophile.     And  in  truth  he  was  an  in- 

215 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

tensive  Pan-German,  without  a  spark  of  sympathy  for  the  Jew- 
ish national  idea,  but  super-patriotically  absorbed,  like  most 
emancipated  Jews,  in  the  country  of  his  birth.  In  his  obituary 
in  a  Jewish  nationalist  organ  I  find  the  deceased  characterised 
as  "  one  of  those  zealous  assimilators  who  mislead  the  Jewish 
masses  by  the  mirage  of  European  civilisation,"  and  though 
"  all  his  life  the  champion  of  liberty,  equality  and  justice,  yet 
for  others  only,  and  not  for  his  brethren,  whom  he  did  not  un- 
derstand." Nevertheless  —  be  it  marked  —  he  does  champion 
liberty,  equality  and  justice,  and  preaches  "  religious  freedom 
and  the  sublimity  of  the  principles  of  Moses."  Thus  even 
through  Benedikt  speaks  the  voice  of  Jerusalem.  But  of  the 
contention  that  this  voice  is  raised  for  the  peculiar  political 
benefit  of  the  Jews,  let  this  greatest  of  all  the  Jewish  editors  of 
our  era  be  the  final  disproof. 

It  may  be  I  am  rendering  the  Jews  still  weaker  in  destroying 
the  myth  —  if  it  can  be  destroyed  —  of  their  cohesion  and  soli- 
darity. For  it  was  that  mythical  might  which  induced  the 
French  Government  to  give  its  famous  secret  instruction  to  M. 
Pichon,  at  a  moment  when  the  war  was  going  in  favour  of  Ger- 
many, to  dangle  before  the  Jews  of  the  world  the  largest  pos- 
sible hopes  as  regards  Palestine.  The  bait,  we  have  seen,  failed 
with  Herr  Benedikt.  Unquestionably  there  is  a  solidarity  of 
sentiment  against  Jewish  persecution,  and  it  may  find  incon- 
venient expression  through  Jewish  journalists,  but  this  never 
goes  so  far  as  action,  and  would  even  be  limited  as  thought,  if 
the  political  interest  of  the  country  demanded  silence.  This 
negative  cohesion  is  the  maximum  approach  that  has  ever  been 
made  to  a  Jewish  Weltpolitik.  No,  ten  thousand  European 
papers  owned  and  edited  by  Jews  would  not  make  a  Jewish 
Press,  for  they  would  have  nothing  in  common  unless  it  was 
their  anti-Jewishness.  Thus  "  the  Jewish  Press  "  is  as  legen- 
dary as  "  Jewish  Finance,"  its  power  over  the  issues  of  Peace 
and  War  as  mythical.  It  is  in  every  case  individual  power 
used  for  individual  ends,  local  or  Gentile. 

XVI 

It  is  true  that  the  Jew  aright  to  unite  all  these  streams  of 
power  for  Jewish  ends,  pull  all  these  strings  for  both  self-pro- 
tection  and  the  furtherance  of  Jewish  ideals:  and  I  have  all  my 
life  been  urging  upon  him  to  do  so. 

Just  before  the  war,  I  issued  a  call,  countersigned  by  Max 

216 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Nordau,  for  an  all- Jewish  Congress  at  Basle  —  that  sinister 
city  of  "  the  Elders  of  Zion."  I  urged  that  if  only  as  a  relig- 
ious sect  Israel  needed  concerted  action  in  face  of  common  prob- 
lems and  perils.  It  is  doubtless  the  Gentiles'  perception  that 
this  is  the  natural  policy  and  what  they  would  aim  at,  were  they 
in  Israel's  place,  that  leads  them  on  to  their  misunderstanding. 
Their  apprehension  of  aggressive  design  forgets  to  take  account 
not  only  of  Israel's  ethical  superiority  to  revenge,  but  of  the 
lower  historical  conditions  that  have  reinforced  his  spiritual 
shrinking  from  it  —  the  sixteen  centuries  of  persecution  that, 
ever  since  the  Roman  Empire  embraced  Christianity  as  the 
python  embraces  its  victims,  have  sapped  the  Maccabaan  spirit. 
Islam,  that  later-born  daughter  of  the  synagogue,  was  only  less 
harsh  to  her  mother  than  Christianity.  That  the  Jew  did  not 
break  under  the  strain  is  marvellous,  but  it  would  have  been  a 
miracle  if  he  had  remained  unbent.  It  is  the  same  pliancy  which 
saved  him  from  snapping  in  twain  that  has  produced  what  has 
been  aptly  called  "  the  Ghetto  bend."  Consider,  for  example, 
how  the  greatness  of  the  Rothschilds  was  cradled:  of  what 
Ghetto  they  were  the  children.  History's  first  word  anent  the 
Jews  of  Frankfort  —  in  whose  Judengasse  their  old  gabled 
Stammhaus  still  stands  —  is  "  Hep !  Hep !  "  And  the  mas- 
sacre of  the  year  1241  was  followed  by  an  exodus  which  left  the 
Emperor  bewailing  his  lost  revenue  and  nursing  an  obdurate 
grievance  against  his  inconsiderate  Christian  burghers.  For 
the  Jews  were  his  private  property  —  servi  camera  —  and  could 
be  lent,  pledged,  or  farmed  out  like  any  other  source  of  revenue. 
Here,  indeed,  was  their  main  safety:  they  were  as  valuable  as 
pedigree  cattle.  In  1349,  when  the  ravages  of  the  Black  Death, 
with  the  inevitable  accusation  that  the  Jews  had  poisoned  the 
wells,  foreshadowed  copious  pogroms,  the  far-seeing  Carl  the 
Fourth  hastened  to  pledge  his  Frankfort  Jews  to  the  city  for 
some  15,000  pounds  of  hellers,  and,  despite  his  royal  promise, 
left  them  unredeemed.  Jews,  not  as  pawnbrokers,  but  in  pawn 
to  a  Christian  city,  constitute  a  not  unamusing  inversion  of 
the  conventional  concept.  At  a  later  period  a  complex  Chris- 
tian transaction  —  wheels  within  wheels,  or  loans  within  mort- 
gages —  brought  the  Frankfort  Jews  under  the  power  of  the 
Archbishop  of  Mayence,  and  there  were  pretty  quarrels  be- 
tween their  various  Christian  proprietors.  Penned  in  the 
Judengasse  behind  the  three  iron-lined  gates,  and  badged  on 
their  garments,  they  lived  under  a  coil  of  police  regulations, 
much  like  aliens  in  the  recent  war,  and  in  moments  when  the 

217 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

mob  saw  red,  like  enemy  aliens.  Plague  and  massacre,  flight 
and  optimistic  return  —  such  are  throughout  the  ages  the  woof 
and  warp  of  this  Ghetto's  story.  And  at  the  best  that  "  curi- 
ous system  of  degrading  customs  and  debasing  laws  which  would 
have  broken  the  heart  of  any  other  people,"  not  to  mention  the 
twenty-six  separate  sorts  of  special  Jew-taxes  that  would  have 
broken  the  bank  of  any  other  people.  When  as  late  as  1814 
the  Frankfort  Jews  demanded  emancipation,  the  great  free 
Christian  city  did  not  scruple  to  remind  them  that  they  were 
still  its  unredeemed  pledge. 

Yet  it  is  from  this  pariah  population  that  the  Rothschilds  — 
their  very  name  imposed  by  the  State  after  the  Red  Shield  on 
their  old  gabled  home,  No.  174,  Jew  Street  —  emerged  to  rule 
for  a  time  the  European  money  market. 

It  would  be  folly  to  expect  them  to  use  their  power  other  than 
circumspectly.  The  marks  of  such  chains  are  not  to  be  effaced 
in  a  single  century.  Even  the  Zionist  movement,  though  it  was 
created  by  a  Herzl,  and  has  produced  a  Jabotinsky,  has  never 
risen  to  the  heights  of  its  great  argument,  is  timid,  undigni- 
fied, obsequious  and  unassertive.  The  children  of  the  Ghetto 
who  cowered  in  the  cramped  alleys,  cut  off  from  sun  or  fresh 
air,  or  spent  the  dreadful  night,  massed  in  the  congested  ceme- 
tery, clad  in  their  ritual  shrouds  for  the  death-confession  of 
sin,  and  passively  waiting  to  be  murdered  by  the  mob,  still  suf- 
fer, as  Herzl  profoundly  pointed  out,  from  Agoraphobia,  dread 
of  an  open  space.  An  anecdote  of  Horace  Vernet,  the  French 
painter,  relates  that  he  wandered  despairingly  for  weeks  in 
search  of  a  suitable  model  for  a  beggar  till  one  day,  meeting  a 
white-bearded,  tragic-eyed  friend  on  the  Boulevard,  he  cried  out 
in  ecstasy :  "  The  very  man !  "  It  was  a  Paris  Rothschild. 
The  anecdote  is  pregnant. 

With  such  a  subservience  to  the  environment,  whether  engen- 
dered of  subconscious  fear,  super-conscious  circumspection  or 
exaggerated  respect,  it  is  easy  to  understand  how  the  very 
leaders  of  Zionism  can  disavow  any  aspiration  for  a  purely 
Jewish  State  —  the  race  that  is  supposed  to  covet  the  world 
shrinking  back  weakly  from  the  opportunity  of  securing  even 
a  piece  little  larger  than  Wales,  just  as  in  1904  it  rejected  the 
offer  of  a  valuable  territory  in  East  Africa. 

Had  the  English  really  been  the  lost  Ten  Tribes,  the  sus- 
picion of  Israel's  world-greed  would  have  had  some  ground  — 
a  fourth  of  the  globe  in  fact.  In  the  words  of  "  Rule  Britan- 
nia":— 

218 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  All  thine  shall  be  the  subject  main, 
And  every  shore  it  circles  thine." 

But  for  an  English  Colonial  Governor  like  Sir  Charles  Bruce  to 
suspect  the  Jews  of  imperialism  is  the  last  stroke  of  irony.1 

When  Goldwin  Smith  asked  in  his  famous  article,  "  Can  the 
Jew  be  a  Patriot?  "  the  then  Chief  Rabbi,  Hermann  Adler,  has- 
tened with  an  anxious  affirmative.  But  the  alarmed  defender 
did  not  summarise  the  matter  by  pointing  out  that  life  is  not 
logical,  only  psychological.  However  you  might  prove  log- 
ically that,  given  his  liturgical  visions,  the  Jew  could  not  be  a 
patriot,  the  fact  remained  that  he  was  only  too  patriotic.  Na- 
tionality, as  I  have  shown  in  my  little  book,  "  The  Principle  of 
Nationalities,"  is  practically  an  effect  of  environment,  and  it  is 
independent  of  race,  which  is  hereditary  and  objective,  whereas 
Nationality  is  acquired  and  subjective.  There  may  be  affinities 
and  common  expressions  of  race  between  quite  different  nation- 
alistic groups,  as  among  the  French  of  Quebec,  of  New  Orleans, 
and  of  Paris,  but  no  one  supposes  that  three  separate  and  an- 
tagonistic war-fevers  would  not  be  generated  in  a  crisis.  The 
Jew  responds  to  his  nationality-making  environment  with  his 
habitual  super-sensitiveness.  Witness  Disraeli,  of  whom  Lord 
Salisbury  said :  "  Zeal  for  the  greatness  of  England  was  the 
passion  of  his  life."  Witness  the  rhapsodies  of  Sir  John  Mon- 
ash  over  Australia,  whose  soldiers  he  led  to  unbroken  victory. 
Here  you  have  a  real  conquering  Jew,  but  his  legend  will  be 
Australian,  not  Jewish,  just  as  Primrose  Day  is  an  English,  not 
a  Jewish  institution.  So  chauvinist  is  the  Jew  that  he  will  not 
only  fight  and  die  for  the  country  that  shelters  him,  he  will  even 
demand  Palestine  for  his  poorer  brethren  if  a  similar  sympathy 
is   felt  in  his  Gentile  environment. 

Much  of  the  present  Zionism  in  the  wealthier  circles  of  Anglo- 
Jewry  has  its  origin  in  this  reflected  source,  as  well  as  in  a  patri- 
otic fervour  for  the  extension  of  the  British  Empire  in  the 
East.2  It  is  a  great  pity  that  Governments  are  generally  ig- 
norant of  the  merest  rudiments  of  psychology,  so  that  our  own 
legislature  has  recently  under  mob  clamour  altered  the  correct 

i  The  valuable  revised  version  of  the  English  Bible,  issued  by  the  Jewish 
Publication  Society  of  America,  observes  in  its  preface:  "The  English  lan- 
guage is,  unless  all  signs  fail,  to  become  the  current  speech  of  the  majority 
of  the  Children  of  Israel."  This  prognostication  is  hardly  consistent  with  a 
sense  of  a  specifically  Jewish  future,  much  less  of  a  physically  conquering 
Jewish  future. 

2  The  Jewish  Guardian  actually  quotes: 

"'Here  and  here  did  England  help  me:  how  can  I  help  England?' — say." 

219 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

law  of  nationality  which  determines  it  by  residence  (jus  soli) 
into  one  determining  it  by  blood  (jus  sanguinis)  as  though  man 
were  a  pedigree  brute  and  not  a  spirit.  Presumably  by  this 
criterion  a  man  who  had  lived  all  his  life  on  the  Continent 
would,  if  only  his  father  was  English,  be  accounted  of  British 
nationality. 

XVII 

But  if  thus  under  psychological  analysis  (or  psycho-analysis) 
the  case  against  the  Jew  as  a  capitalistic  conspirator  to  destroy 
the  Gentiles  breaks  down  —  for  the  Jew,  wherever  emancipated, 
is  a  passionate  devotee  of  the  national  civilisation  —  the  mystic 
magnification  of  Jewish  potency  and  malignity  finds  refuge  in 
the  quite  opposite  charge  that  the  Jew  is  the  power  behind  Bol- 
shevism. The  antithesis  has  been  indeed  flamboyantly  accentu- 
ated by  Mr.  Austin  Harrison,  who,  without  an}r  ill-will,  but  in 
a  mere  passion  for  the  picturesque,  sees  the  Jew  as  the  embodi- 
ment of  the  rival  forces  that  contest  for  the  empire  of  the  world. 
Not  even  Disraeli  would  have  advanced  so  megalomaniacal  a 
claim.  In  so  far  as  the  power  of  producing  antithetical  phe- 
nomena is  concerned,  Mr.  Harrison's  ascription  of  polarity  to 
the  race  was,  as  we  have  seen,  anticipated  by  its  own  historian, 
Graetz,  and  in  so  far  as  he  is  under  the  usual  illusion  of  Jewish 
wealth  and  its  peculiar  exercise  by  Jews  to  control  Governments, 
he  has  already  been  answered.  It  is  characteristic,  however,  of 
the  legendary  treatment  of  the  Jewish  question  that  Mr.  Har- 
rison, having  to  recognise  Cecil  Rhodes  as  the  protagonist  of 
modern  capitalist  imperialism,  and  Lenin  as  his  antithesis, 
throws  over  the  former  a  vague  suspicion  of  Jewish  blood,  and 
actually  writes  of  Lenin  as  if  he  were  either  a  Jew  or  a  Jewish 
tool.  Perhaps  he  is  relying  on  The  Times,  which  in  its  "  His- 
tory of  the  War  "  has  with  characteristic  historical  accuracy 
explained  to  the  world  that  Lenin  is  a  Jew  named  Zederblum. 

But  while  capitalistic  imperialism  has  no  organic  connection 
with  the  Jewish  temperament  —  is  it  not  Mr.  Montagu  who  is 
showing  England  the  path  to  true  imperialism?  —  Socialism  is 
unquestionably  in  harmony  with  the  Jewish  genius  from  the  days 
of  Moses,  while  internationalism  is  latent  in  Isaiah  and  Amos : 
not  Socialism  in  any  narrow  schematic  form  of  partition  of 
property  or  destruction  of  individualism,  but  the  conception  of 
the  national  organism  as  one  happy  and  righteous  whole,  with 
the  world  as  a  federation  of  such  peaceful  systems.     There  is 

220 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

thus  to-day  not  so  much  a  "  new  evangel "  as  an  attempt  of 
the  Jewish  soul  to  re-express  for  itself  and  mankind  its  old 
aspiration  under  the  changed  conditions  of  the  modern  world. 
The  Bible,  as  Mr.  George  Hodges,  Dean  of  the  Episcopal 
Theological  School,  Cambridge,  Massachusetts,  reminds  us  in 
his  latest  work,  "  is  a  dangerous  and  dynamic  book,  radical  and 
revolutionary,  essentially  democratic,"  which  "  puts  all  con- 
servatisms in  peril,"  and  "  is  an  armoury  for  the  forces  of  mili- 
tant progress."  Disraeli  was  never  more  Jewish  than  when  he 
marked  in  Sybil  his  horror  of  the  "  Two  Nations  "  of  wealth 
and  poverty  into  which  England,  like  Europe  at  large,  was 
divided. 

If  the  contention  of  the  Jew-hating  Comte  de  Soissons  in  a 
recent  number  of  the  Quarterly  Reviexo  that  the  Jews  are  the 
revolutionary  leaven  in  the  modern  world  is  false  (since  so  many 
are  stockish  upholders  of  the  Soissons  world,  and  so  many 
revolutionaries  are  of  other  races)  and  if  it  is  equally  false  that 
even  the  rebellious  Jewish  minority  is  animated  by  a  hatred  of 
Christianity  (since  more  and  not  less  Christianity  is  the  Jew's 
demand)  there  is  no  denying  the  role  of  Jews  both  in  the  con- 
ception of  Socialism  and  the  struggle  for  it.  This  pole  of  Mr. 
Harrison's  antithesis  has,  therefore,  more  truth  than  the  other. 
But  in  succumbing  to  the  policy  of  violence  as  the  short  cut  to 
the  millennium,  Trotsky  has  been  faithless  to  the  spirit  of 
Judaism  —  that  long  tradition  of  Reason  and  Love.  If  it  was  a 
Jew  who  said,  "  The  kingdom  of  heaven  suffereth  violence,  and 
the  violent  take  it  by  force,"  he  did  not  say  it  of  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  on  earth.     The  red  road  is  not  the  path  to  Zion. 

Nor  has  it  been  cut  out  by  Jews  in  particular.  Its  inhu- 
manly rigid  straightness  is  the  work  of  the  Russian  ideologue, 
Lenin.  And  if  there  is  an  excessive  percentage  of  Jews  among 
the  Commissaries,  it  is  due  partly  to  the  aforesaid  disproportion 
of  Jewish  figures  in  everything  and  anything,  but  more  to  the 
general  illiteracy  of  Russia,  the  vast  majority  of  whose  popu- 
lation is  analphabetic.  Jewry  produces  great  revolutionary 
leaders,  as  it  produces  great  mathematicians  or  great  actors : 
but  its  proletariat  is  the  least  revolutionary  of  all  the  prole- 
tariats, as  is  proved  by  its  meekness  in  accepting  revolutions 
imposed  by  the  environment.  Sufferance,  as  Shakespeare  cor- 
rectly perceived,  is  the  badge  of  the  tribe. 

In  the  genesis  of  the  Bolshevist  revolution  the  Jews  were 
even  conspicuous  by  their  geographical  absence.  As  Dr. 
Reuben  Blank,  the  representative  of  the  Petrograd  Jews,  sums 

221 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

it  up,  the  first  generator  of  Bolshevism  was  the  fleet  at  Kron- 
stadt,  into  which  not  a  single  Jew  was  admitted ;  the  second  was 
the  proletariat  of  Petrograd,  a  town  into  which  only  a  rare 
Jew  could  find  entry.  From  these  two  centres  it  spread  to 
Great  Russia,  where  the  Jews  constitute  less  than  1  per  cent,  of 
the  population.1  Victor  Kopf,  the  Bolshevist  Commissary  at 
Berlin,  complains  that  only  one  Jewish  party  in  Russia  —  the 
Poale-Zion  —  welcomed  Bolshevism,  that  the  Jewish  trading  and 
shop-keeping  classes  are  its  greatest  enemy,  and  that  although 
they  are  massacred  in  pogroms  organised  by  the  counter-revo- 
lutionaries, they  will  not  fall  in  with  the  Socialist  regime. 

A  friend  of  my  own,  returning  from  Moscow,  reported  that 
the  question :  "  Is  there  a  God?  "  was  raised  in  a  public  debate 
by  Lunatscharsky,  the  Bolshevist  Commissioner  for  Public 
Instruction.  The  only  debater  on  the  affirmative  side  was 
Rabbi  Mase  of  Moscow.  Not  a  single  Russian  pope,  in  that 
religious  capital  of  Russia  with  its  swarm  of  churches,  dared  to 
emulate  this  Jewish  courage.  In  a  letter  to  The  Times  I  had 
ventured  the  above  interpretation  that  the  comparative  prepon- 
derance of  Jewish  Commissaries  was  merely  due  to  the  Jews 
being  an  educated  folk  in  an  illiterate  land.  I  see  that  Captain 
Peter  Wright,  in  his  official  report  on  Poland,  discussing  the 
same  question,  says :  — 

"  Bolshevism  requires  a  vast  administration  and  propaganda, 
which  in  turn  require  that  men  shall  at  least  be  able  to  read  and 
write.  But  in  the  proletariat  of  Eastern  Europe  only  the  Jews  pos- 
sess these  accomplishments,  and  therefore  the  administrators  and 
propagandists  of  Bolshevism  must  necessarily  be  Jews.  So  much  so 
that  Bolshevism  appears  at  times  to  be  almost  purely  a  Jewish 
movement.  But  the  Commission  had  the  opportunity  of  studying  it 
very  close  at  hand  on  the  Eastern  frontier,  and  in  that  part  of  the 
world  at  least  this  was  certainly  not  the  case." 

Indeed,  the  Chief  of  the  Commission,  Sir  Stuart  Samuel, 
reports  that  "  the  Bolsheviks  publicly  complained  that  only  1 
per  cent,  of  their  army  were  Jews." 

The  attempt  to  represent  Jewishness  and  Bolshevism  as 
synonymous,  naturally  does  not  fall  short  of  my  own  person, 
and  persists  in  face  of  rectifications.  It  may  be  useful,  there- 
fore, to  reproduce  here  an  extract  from  a  speech  of  mine  to  a 

i  Reference  to  the  statistics  given  liter  in  this  book  will  show  that  with 
the  Jews  of  Poland  and  the  Ukraine  drawn  off  into  separate  polities,  only 
900,000  Jews  now  remain  in  Russia  proper. 

222 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

meeting  at  the  Kingsway   Hall,  largely  Bolshevist,   in  May, 
1919:  — 

"  I  should  be  no  honest  advocate  of  liberty  if  I  endorsed  the  Rus- 
sian method  of  imposing  Socialism  by  brute  force;  and  even  Social- 
ism proper  —  divorced  from  violence  as  it  appears  to  have  come  in 
Hungary  —  holds  grave  dangers  for  the  human  spirit,  however 
welcome  be  the  tardy  justice  it  does  to  the  human  body.  It  is  mov- 
ing towards  us  so  swiftly  in  these  latter  days  that  the  question  of  the 
due  boundaries  between  the  State  and  the  individual  may  be  upon  us 
sooner  than  any  of  us  can  foresee.  And  if  Socialism  encroaches  too 
far  upon  individual  liberty  —  and  Mr.  Brailsford,  writing  from  Hun- 
gary, says  that  there  is  no  liberty  at  all  there  —  not  all  its  loaves 
and  fishes  will  save  it  from  the  soullessness  attaching  to  all  mechan- 
ical constructions.  For  the  State  has  no  life  save  that  which  comes 
to  it  from  its  individuals ;  and  to  stereotype  for  all  time  the  life  it 
has  absorbed  from  any  one  generation  is  to  sterilise  it.  The  Gospels 
speak  of  a  mysterious  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost.  What  can  this 
be  but  the  denial  of  Liberty?  Our  Quaker  friends  are  right.  For 
the  Holy  Ghost  is  the  spirit  which  moves  through  all  things  and 
blows  through  all  men ;  and  to  crib,  cabin,  and  confine  it,  whether 
by  a  British  Order  in  Council,  or  the  edict  of  a  Russian  or  Hun- 
garian Soviet,  is  the  supreme  blasphemy.  Our  ancestors  had  only 
too  great  a  reverence  for  the  hermit  who  cut  himself  off  from  the 
State  and  its  doings,  but  it  was  a  sound  instinct  that  made  them 
realise  that  the  life  was  in  the  man  and  not  in  the  State.  By  us, 
hermits  have  been  dragged  from  their  mountain-tops  and  clapped 
into  khaki.  We  have  conscribed  the  very  gypsies  who  live  outside 
all  States;  we  have  constrained  the  consciences  of  the  few  Chris- 
tians among  us.  All  this  is  a  fatal  policy.  It  leads  to  a  hive,  not 
a  human  civilisation.  '  The  strongest  man,'  said  Ibsen,  '  is  he  who 
stands  most  alone.'  And  similarly,  I  say  the  strongest  State  is  that 
which  lets  him  stand  alone.  Not  to  make  the  world  safe  for  democ- 
racy, but  to  make  it  safe  for  minorities,  is  the  true  human  ideal." 

Mr.  Bertrand  Russell  seems  to  have  had  to  go  to  Russia  to 
perceive  these  obvious  implications  of  the  communistic  ideal 
when  that  ideal  comes,  not  as  its  spiritual  essence  requires,  from 
the  members  of  the  community  themselves,  all  animated  by  love 
and  brotherhood  and  the  desire  of  co-operation  for  the  common- 
weal, but  from  above  by  brute  force.  Mr.  Grimstone,  the 
schoolmaster  in  "  Vice  Versa,"  remarked  that  he  would  establish 
a  spirit  of  unmurmuring  happiness  and  unreasoning  content- 
ment in  his  school  if  he  had  to  flog  every  schoolboy  to  achieve  it, 
and  Bolshevism  in  its  Russian  caricature  is  only  Grimstonism 
writ  large.     But  in  so  far  as  the  war  for  freedom  has  under- 

223 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

mined  individual  liberty  throughout  the  world,  in  so  far  the  gov- 
erning classes  have  themselves  prepared  the  way  for  Bolshevism. 

The  sole  fire  behind  all  this  acrid  smoke  is  that  everywhere 
throughout  Europe,  as  the  old  autocracies  fall,  and  careers 
open  themselves  to  talent,  Jews  are  found  stepping  into  minis- 
terial or  official  positions.  This  is  naturally  most  copiously  the 
case  with  the  most  numerous  aggregation  of  Jews  —  the  Rus- 
sian —  and  the  unfortunate  coincidence  that  here  the  world's 
orthodox  economic  order  has  been  reversed,  provides  a  unique 
handle  for  the  secular  indictment  of  the  Jew  as  the  destroying 
devil.  The  only  piece  of  luck  in  the  business  is  that  the  head 
and  front  of  the  offence  is  a  Slav.  All  Israel  should  set  up  a 
statue  to  Lenin  for  not  being  a  Jew. 

Mr.  Austin  Harrison's  attempt  to  represent  the  contem- 
porary world-struggle  as  embodying  the  two  polar  Jewish  ideals 
of  Capitalism  and  Bolshevism  is  thus  largely  melodramatic. 
That  epithet  must  attach  also  to  Mr.  Winston  Churchill's 
attempt  to  read  history  by  the  same  limelight,  only  with  Chris- 
tianity in  the  role  of  Capitalism;  though  it  is,  of  course,  true 
that  to  the  Jews  is  owing  what  Mr.  Churchill  describes  as  that 
"  system  of  ethics,  which,  even  if  it  were  entirely  separated  from 
the  supernatural,  would  be  incomparably  the  most  precious 
possession  of  mankind,  worth  in  fact  the  fruits  of  all  other 
wisdom  and  learning  put  together."  The  praise  of  Christianity 
comes  indeed  curiously  from  our  War  Minister,  nor  can  one 
alas !  claim  with  him  that  "  on  this  system  of  faith  there  has 
been  built  out  of  the  wreck  of  the  Roman  Empire  the  whole  of 
our  existing  civilisation."  History  is  not  so  simple  as  all  that, 
especially  when  one  considers  that  "  this  system  of  faith,"  unlike 
Judaism  or  Mohammedanism,  has  never  been  applied  to  prac- 
tical life.  It  has  been  on  the  contrary  the  first  religion  to 
divorce  itself  from  practical  politics  and  to  breathe  only  eccle- 
siastical air.  It  may  be  that  the  Jews,  to  whom,  as  Mr. 
Churchill  says,  the  world  owes  Christianity,  will  take  back  their 
misused  and  misshaped  loan  and  proceed  to  utilise  it  for  them- 
selves. 

But  correctly  as  Mr.  Churchill  recognises  the  provenance  of 
Christianity,  he  becomes  as  melodramatic  as  Mr.  Harrison  when 
he  sets  up  Bolshevism  as  its  Satanic  antithesis  and  in  a  passage 
that  out-fantasies  Mr.  Harrison  and  would  arride  the  author  of 
"  The  Jewish  Spectre,"  observes  that  "  it  would  seem  as  if  the 
Gospel  of  Christ  and  the  Gospel  of  Antichrist  were  destined  to 
originate  among  the  same  people  and  that  this  mystic  and  mys- 

224 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

terious  race  had  been  chosen  for  the  supreme  manifestations  of 
the  divine  and  the  diabolical." 

Now  obviously,  so  far  as  practical  life  is  concerned,  the  two 
manifestations  are  one  and  the  same.  The  first  principle  of 
Bolshevism  was  laid  down  by  St.  Paul  when  he  said:  "  If  any 
would  not  work,  neither  should  he  eat."  Mr.  Churchill  has 
elsewhere  put  the  anti-Bolshevist  case  well,  but  nothing  can 
justify  such  galimatias  as  this  antithesis  between  Bolshevism 
and  Christianity,  of  which  Bolshevism  has  been  at  worst  an 
enforced  application.  Perhaps  in  that  masterly  letter  of  Mr. 
Lucien  Wolf's  we  may  find  the  clue  to  this  mentality.  It  is  the 
old  "  anti-Christ "  literature  again,  remembered  or  re-created 
in  a  brain  that  is  seeing  red,  and  seeing  falsely.  This  perversity 
of  vision  produced  Mr.  Churchill's  Russian  policy,  and  the  fail- 
ure of  that  policy  has  only  distorted  his  vision  further.  To 
this,  and  not  to  sheer  bravado,  may  charitably  be  accredited  his 
acclamation  of  his  instrument,  Denikin,  the  destroyer  and 
despiser  of  the  Jewries  along  his  path,  as  the  protector  of 
Israel.  Vladimir  Tiomkin,  the  head  of  Ukrainian  Jewry,  whom 
I  have  already  quoted,  testifies  of  this  "  Protector  of  Israel  " 
protected  b}r  Churchill :  — 

"  The  pogroms  of  Denikin' s  Armies  were  effected  under  the  lead- 
ership of  the  divisional  commanders  General  Ckuro,  General  Mam- 
antov  and  General  Progamirov.  These  pogroms  differ  from  all 
others  by  virtue  of  their  original  methods  which  seem  to  have  been 
carefully  worked  out  beforehand.  Not  only  was  there  a  unity  in 
method  but  all  the  circulars  of  the  different  commands  and  those 
which  were  issued  by  Denikin's  information  bureau,  all  bore  the 
underlying  suggestion  that  Jews  were  Bolsheviks,  and  Denikin's 
representatives  abroad  actually  made  an  effort  to  convince  the  Euro- 
pean Governments  that  this  libel  was  the  truth.  This  was  a  well- 
organised  effort  to  justify  beforehand  the  massacres  which  were 
subsequently  to  take  place.  In  many  instances  they  appeared  to 
have  succeeded. 

"  In  their  nature  and  spirit,  Denikin's  pogroms,  fires  and  murders 
appear  to  have  been  the  most  terrible.  While  the  number  of  killed 
and  violated  do  not  appear  to  be  comparatively  large,  the  at- 
mosphere of  oppression  and  fear  which  resulted  from  his  methods 
were  by  far  the  most  cruel.  The  question  here  is  not  whether  100,- 
000  or  200,000  Jews  were  killed.  The  point  of  importance  is  the 
fact  that  three  million  Jews  in  Ukrainia  and  Southern  Russia  found 
themselves  placed  outside  the  pale  of  every  law  and  in  a  condition 
where  they  might  be  exterminated  to  the  very  last  soul.  In  every 
city,  town  and  village  through  which  Deniken's  forces  passed,  all 

225 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

males  were  in  the  most  literal  sense  exterminated,  all  women  without 
any  exceptions  were  violated,  and  no  child  or  aged  were  spared. 
Throughout  every  spot  that  Denikin's  armies  touched  the  same  red 
line  is  to  be  traced,  the  same  results  found.  Appeals  were  made 
to  Denikin,  appeals  were  forwarded  to  the  European  Powers  which 
were  maintaining  his  forces,  but  it  was  as  an  echo  in  the  desert,  no 
relief  or  protection  came  from  anywhere. 

"  Wherever  Denikin's  armies  arrived,  they  removed  the  Jewish 
members  of  the  municipality,  shut  down  the  communal  institutions, 
and  systematically  set  about  carrying  out  their  work  of  murder  and 
pillage.  Invariably  the  most  innocent  people  would  be  exposed  to 
punishment." 

And  presumably  it  is  the  same  obliquity  of  vision  which  saw  in 
Denikin  a  "  protector  of  Israel "  that  accounts  for  Mr. 
Churchill's  inability  to  perceive  the  transformation  in  all  social 
values  of  which  he  himself  has  been  a  leading  agent.  Was  it  not 
he  who  pointed  out  that  the  achievements  of  his  Ministry  of 
Munitions  provided  the  best  argument  for  State  Socialism? 
And  after  he  has  conscribed  human  life  remorselessly,  and  even 
recklessly,  for  the  benefit  of  the  State,  that  monstrous  Leviathan 
of  Hobbes,  the  conscription  of  labour  or  of  property  becomes  a 
minor,  not  a  greater  expression  of  communism,  or  of  universal 
sacrifice  for  the  State-idol.  And  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  sanc- 
tity of  property  was  destroyed  by  the  Defence  of  the  Realm 
Act,  as  Lord  Rosebery  discovered  with  such  naive  surprise. 
Once  the  maya  or  illusion  of  sacredness  is  dissipated,  it  is  im- 
possible to  reconstitute  it.  The  freedom  of  the  individual,  of 
which  property  is  only  one  facet,  having  been  profaned,  it  was 
impossible  to  put  bounds  to  the  sacrilege.  The  most  law-abid- 
ing municipalities  seem  now  to  annex  empty  rooms  for  homeless 
people  as  unscrupulously  as  the  Government  of  which  Mr. 
Churchill  was  a  member  annexed  full  hotels  for  homeless  Depart- 
ments. And  with  Mr.  Bonar  Law  placidly  discussing  a  Capital 
Levy,  and  the  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  already  appropriat- 
ing over  a  quarter  of  our  incomes,  Mr.  Churchill's  prophetic 
fury  against  Bolshevism,  though  it  is  genuine,  has  no  more  truth 
in  itself  than  the  soap-begotten  froth  on  the  lips  of  the  pseudo- 
epileptic.  "  The  dictation  of  the  proletariat  "  is  already 
implicit,  in  our  Adult.  Suffrage,  which  Mr.  Churchill  helped  to 
introduce.  And  if  the  earth  is  rocking  and  the  fountains  of 
the  great  deep  are  broken  up,  it  is  he  and  his  peers  whose 
"  Knock-out-Blow  "  has  brought  the  earthquake  and  the  deluge. 
What  !     Did  they  think  they  could  loose  tempest  and  pestilence 

226 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

and  all  the  Beasts  of  the  Apocalypse  for  a  whole  quinquennium 
and  then  with  a  movement  of  their  little  finger  pacify  the  whirl- 
wind, and  purify  the  plague,  and  call  off  the  dragons  and  the 
ten-horned  monsters?  Though  the  masses  should  remain 
"  dumb  driven  cattle,"  did  the  politicians  who  had  driven  them 
to  the  shambles  suppose  the  world  held  no  men  with  bigger 
hearts  and  brains  than  themselves,  that  they  would  be  allowed  to 
return  unquestioned,  uncriticised  and  unrestrained,  but  merely 
belaurelled  and  begilded,  to  their  crude  conception  of  life  and 
their  barbarous  antiquated  leadership? 

Mr.  Churchill,  who  presides  at  the  War  Office,  whose  whole 
atmosphere  is  the  mutual  mass-murder  carried  on  between 
nations,  and  whose  class,  as  I  said  in  a  speech,  has  governed 
Europe  into  a  graveyard,  is  sincerely  horrified  at  Lenin,  whom 
he  regards  as  a  monster  throned  upon  skulls,  with  bones  for  his 
footstool.  But  there  is  no  inherent  ethical  difference  between  a 
war  of  nations  and  a  war  of  classes  —  they  are  equally  bar- 
barous —  and  the  traditional  legitimacy  of  military  operations 
constitutes  no  more  valid  a  defence  of  war  than  the  traditional 
sanction  of  suttee  or  cannibalism  in  their  respective  countries 
constituted  a  vindication  of  these  savage  practices.  The  only 
possible  justification  of  war  lies  in  self-defence  under  actual 
brute  attack,  and  very  rarely  can  modern  war  plead  this  grim 
necessity.  The  attempt  to  precipitate  the  millennium  by  force 
is  as  reprehensible  as  it  is  futile.  But  it  is  less  criminal  than 
the  sullen  determination  of  Christendom  to  continue  the  still 
more  murderous  order  of  Sovereign  States,  united  at  best  by  a 
loveless  League  in  a  peace  which  passeth  all  understanding. 

XVIII 

Having  disposed  of  the  legendary  factors  in  the  Legend  of 
the  Conquering  Jew,  we  are  now  finally  in  a  position  to  seek  for 
its  core  of  truth. 

We  have  seen  from  Sir  Charles  Bruce's  own  quotation  from 
Disraeli  that  the  attempt  at  extirpation  has  been  made  not  of 
the  heathen  by  the  Jews,  but  of  the  Jews  by  the  heathen.  It 
has  been  like  a  scientific  epical  experiment.  To  repeat  Dis- 
raeli's fine  summary :  — 

"  The  attempt  to  extirpate  them  has  been  made  under  the  most 
favourable  auspices  and  on  the  largest  scale;  the  most  considerable 
means  that  man  could  command  have  been  pertinaciously  applied  to 

227 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

this  object  for  the  longest  period  of  recorded  time.  Egyptian 
Pharaohs,  Assyrian  Kings,  Roman  Emperors,  Scandinavian  Cru- 
saders, Gothic  Princes  and  holy  inquisitors  have  alike  devoted  their 
energies  to  the  fulfilment  of  this  common  purpose.  Expatriation, 
exile,  captivity,  confiscation,  torture  on  the  most  ingenious  and  mas- 
sacres on  the  most  extensive  scale,  a  curious  system  of  degrading 
customs  and  debasing  laws  which  would  have  broken  the  heart  of 
any  other  people,  have  been  tried  in  vain." 

And  what  has  science  to  say  to  the  failure  of  this  experiment 
in  annihilation,  the  experiment  that  is  at  this  very  moment  in 
murderous  action  on  a  larger  scale  than  ever  before,  even  in  the 
tragic  generations  of  Israel?  Whence  comes  this  strange 
resisting  power?  It  comes  partly  from  the  Jew's  ubiquity  but 
primarily  from  his  faith  —  a  faith  which  in  the  weakness  of  the 
flesh  might  seek  unworthy  allies  in  money  and  in  mimicry  to  pre- 
serve the  race  that  was  its  physical  channel,  but  which  was 
animated  at  bottom  by  confidence  in  that  very  extermination  of 
the  heathen  which  Sir  Charles  Bruce  misapprehends.  The 
heathen  would  be  exterminated  by  ceasing  to  be  heathen.  The 
idolaters,  polytheists  and  worshippers  of  immoral  deities  would 
accept  the  One  God  of  justice  and  truth.  In  this  sense  the  Jew 
did  contemplate  over-running  and  conquering  the  earthy 

In  our  modern  catholic  sympathy  with  all  expressions  of 
religion,  we  are  apt  to  overlook  the  abominations  and  cruelties 
with  which  most  pagan  cults  were  entwined  or  into  which  they 
degenerated.  For  the  Jewish  prophets,  living  amid  these  prac- 
tices, and  seeing  Israel  straying  after  the  worship  of  Moloch  or 
Baal,  with  their  human  sacrifices  or  their  sexual  excesses,  there 
was  no  such  glamour.  The  very  land  had  been  defiled  by  these 
abominations  and  had  vomited  forth  its  inhabitants,  taught  the 
writer  of  "  Leviticus,"  and  so  far  from  encouraging  the  Israel- 
ites to  enlarge  the  promised  land,  he  warned  them  lest  it  spue 
them  out  likewise.  For,  even  intenser  than  the  prophets'  sense 
of  a  single  divine  omnipotence  behind  Nature  and  History,  as 
against  the  polytheism  of  Greece  or  the  dualism  of  Persia,  was 
their  sense  that  this  mysterious  Power  was  a  Power  not  merely 
making  for  Righteousness,  but  demanding  it.  And  for  the  uni- 
versal acknowledgment  of  this  Power,  Israel  was  —  they  felt  — 
the  chosen  instrument. 

It  may  be  that  at  moments  of  national  exaltation  this  ambi- 
tion was  despiritualised  into  that  vulgar  imperialism  which 
breaks  out  in  all  conquering  peoples.  But  more  probably  the 
materialisation  of  the  prophetic  message  occurred  in  moments  of 

228 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

national  humiliation,  for  it  was  then  that,  looking  forward  — 
like  the  Belgians  under  the  German  heel  —  to  some  wild  revenge, 
the  masses  would  be  tempted  to  translate  into  gross  dreams  of 
domination  the  ghostly  consolations  of  Isaiah  or  Jeremiah. 
And  for  these  masses,  with  their  inability  to  rise  beyond  the  con- 
ception of  a  physically  conquering  Messiah,  the  traditional 
national  figure  of  King  David  was  at  all  times  a  nucleus  for 
reactionary  thought. 

This  hypothesis  is  borne  out  by  the  history  of  the  Apocalyptic 
literature  beginning  with  Daniel  in  which  this  dream  of  dom- 
ination is  set  forth  most  plainly.  For  that  literature  took  its 
rise  in  the  agonised  years  of  the  second  century  B.C.  when  the 
Syrian  despot,  Antiochus  Epiphanes,  was  ruthlessly  crushing 
out  Judaism  and  imposing  the  worship  of  Zeus  upon  the  Temple. 
Though  Judas  Maccabaeus  triumphed  over  the  tyrant,  and  to 
this  day  annual  candles  are  lit  in  memory  of  this  salvation,  yet 
the  memory  of  the  murdered  martyrs  and  the  humiliation  to  the 
faith  was  equally  deep  and  tenacious.  A  series  of  writings,  at 
once  sublime  and  grotesque,  informed  by  the  notion  of  the  ulti- 
mate revenge  of  the  righteous,  testifies  to  the  reaction  of  the 
Jewish  soul.  Nor  was  the  fact  that  the  victorious  Jews  soon 
passed  under  new  masters,  and  that  Judrea  changed  into  a 
Roman  State,  calculated  to  dim  the  vision.  But  it  should  be 
remembered  that  none  of  these  books  was  admitted  into  the 
canon  of  the  Synagogue  with  the  exception  of  Daniel.  They 
were  all  left  in  the  outer  darkness  of  the  "  Apocrypha,"  and 
Daniel  was  expressly  excluded  from  the  section  of  the 
"  Prophets  "  and  lumped  with  the  "  Writings." 

And  even  this  reactionary  thought  of  the  apocalyptic  writers 
was  interfused  and  irradiated  with  the  larger  Messianic  hope, 
just  as  this  Messianic  hope  in  its  turn  was  never  clearly  divorced 
from  the  prosperity  of  the  race  that  had  nourished  it.  Political 
success  was  to  be  the  natural  outcome  of  religious  rightness,  and 
the  accent  put  on  each  element  of  the  indissoluble  compound 
varied  with  the  quality  of  the  prophet  or  the  believer.  It  was 
at  any  rate  not  the  triumphant  and  profiteering  nationalism 
of  the  modern  Christian  nation ;  at  the  lowest  it  was  never  the 
mere  military  hegemony  of  an  Alexander  or  a  Cassar  that  was 
visioned:  the  Messiah,  though  he  was  to  be  a  conqueror  and  of 
the  seed  of  David,  was  none  the  less  to  bring  the  Kingdom  of 
God  on  earth.  It  was  this  that  explains  how  the  Jewish 
people  —  one  of  the  smallest  of  antiquity  —  came,  j  ust 
eighteen  and  a  half  centuries  ago,  to  challenge  the  masters  of 

229 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

the  world.  Was  it  that  their  nationality  felt  itself  intoler- 
ably oppressed,  their  religion  flouted?  But,  as  we  see  from 
the  Gospels,  Jesus  moved  among  a  reasonably  free  people. 
Oppression,  exaction,  there  was  in  abundance,  but  not  to  the 
breaking  point,  and  though  crucifixion  and  martyrdom  were 
not  unfamiliar,  these  were  probably  more  the  outcome  of  the 
political  ferment  than  its  cause.  No,  the  fight  with  Rome 
was  —  fantastic  as  it  sounds  —  a  fight  for  the  hegemony  of 
the  world:  a  h'ght  inspired  by  two  centuries  of  apocalyptic 
literature,  with  its  visions  of  divine  intervention,  of  Jehovah 
Himself  vindicating  His  people  and  their  faith  in  Him ;  of  the 
imminent  advent  of  His  Kingdom.  It  was  the  same  mystic 
hope  that  animated  the  early  Christians  in  that  same  half- 
century.  But  the  Jews  presumed  to  put  it  to  the  test  of  the 
sword.  As  unflinchingly  as  Abraham  had  set  the  knife  to  the 
throat  of  Isaac,  or  Shadrach,  Meshach  and  Abed-nego  had 
entered  the  fiery  furnace,  they  sought  to  force  the  coming  of 
the  Kingdom  of  God  on  earth.  After  all,  Judas  Maccabaeus 
had  beaten  back  the  gods  of  Greece  that  had  come  in  the  wake 
of  the  all-conquering  Alexander.  Why  should  the  gods  of 
Rome  be  more  powerful?  Already  the  "  chosen  people  "  had 
seen  the  passing  of  the  empires  of  Egypt,  Babylonia,  Chaldea, 
Persia,  Greece.  It  was  not  Israel  that  had  destroyed  them 
but  God.  The  legend  was  of  the  conquering  Jehovah,  not  the 
conquering  Jew.  His  devotees  were  to  be  found  increasingly 
among  the  heathen.  Why  should  He  not  be  given  the  occasion 
of  again  manifesting  His  material  might,  the  occasion  indeed 
that  His  honour  demanded?  Why  should  not  the  Roman 
Empire,  for  all  its  massive  semblance,  fade  and  pass  like  the 
others?  The  event  proved  the  folly  of  trying  to  force  the 
hand  of  Providence.  The  assurance  of  Malachi  that  no  harm 
should  befall  his  people  was  dismally  contradicted.  For  the 
desperate  revolt  was  broken  and  after  one  of  the  stubbornest 
sieges  in  history  the  Holy  City  and  Temple  was  rased  to  the 
ground.  Hundreds  of  the  defenders  were  crucified,  thousands 
left  to  perish  of  starvation,  myriads  sent  to  the  mines  or 
thrown  to  the  beasts  in  the  Roman  arenas ;  the  Jewesses  were 
sold  as  slaves  and  —  such  was  the  glut  —  for  a  mere  song. 
Yet  the  rebellion  still  raged  and  it  was  not  till  two  years  later, 
in  the  year  72  of  our  era,  that  the  last  Judsean  stronghold  — 
Masada  —  fell ;  the  garrison  slaying  first  their  wives  and  chil- 
dren and  then  themselves.  For  eighteen  centuries  no  Jew  would 
pass  under  the  Arch  Li  Rome  which  Titus  erected  to  celebrate 

230 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

his  triumph,  with  its  bas-reliefs  of  the  spoils  of  the  Temple: 
the  seven-branched  candlestick,  the  golden  table  and  the  sacred 
trumpets. 

But  the  Messianic  hope  survived  even  the  seeming  demonstra- 
tion that  Providence  was  on  the  side  of  the  big  battalions ;  to  be 
tragically  disillusioned  again  two  centuries  later  when  Bar 
Cochba,  "  the  Son  of  a  Star,"  proved  only  a  Will  o'  the  Wisp, 
and  Hadrian  passed  the  plough  over  Mount  Zion.  But  even 
then  the  hope  was  not  quenched,  though  the  notion  of  conquest 
gradually  gave  place  to  that  of  a  supernatural  redemption,  to 
be  simultaneous  with  that 

"  One  far-off  divine  event 
To  which  the  whole  creation  moves." 

The  flickering  flame  was  tended  throughout  all  the  Diaspora  by 
the  shadowy  forms  of  the  ancient  prophets  whose  rhapsodies 
had  become  part  of  the  liturgy;  by  the  writers  who  added 
prayers  for  the  Return  to  every  sacred  office;  by  the  pious 
millions  who  in  every  century  fasted  on  the  ninth  of  Ab  to 
commemorate  the  fall  of  Jerusalem;  by  the  long  chain  of 
zealots  whose  tears  have  fallen  every  Friday  on  the  ruined  wall 
of  the  Temple ;  by  the  mediaeval  Spanish  poets  who  sang  of  Zion 
as  of  a  beloved  mistress ;  by  the  old  men  who  in  every  genera- 
tion went  to  die  there  and  by  the  myriads  who  paid  tribute 
to  keep  its  students  alive. 

Nor  were  more  active  pioneers  wanting  to  relieve  with  des- 
perate romance  the  eighteen  centuries  of  waiting:  Davi  Alrui, 
the  Alroy  of  Lord  Beaconsfield,  who  about  1160,  a  thousand 
years  after  Bar  Cochba,  strove  to  lead  the  warlike  Jews  of 
Asia  against  the  Moslem;  Asher  Lammlein,  who -in  1502  pro- 
claimed himself  the  forerunner  of  the  Messiah,  and  induced  the 
Jews  to  observe  the  anticipatory  "  year  of  penitence  " ;  David 
Reubeni,  who  in  1524  arrived  from  Arabia  and  Nubia  —  the 
mysterious  Prince  of  Chaibar  —  and  was  honoured  by  the  Pope 
and  promised  eight  ships  by  the  King  of  Portugal ;  his  follower, 
Solomon  Molcho,  the  Cabbalist,  who  flashed  through  all  lands 
like  a  mystic  meteor,  truly  predicting  flood  at  Rome  and  earth- 
quake at  Lisbon,  and  dying  unshaken  at  the  stake  in  Mantua ; 
Joseph  of  Naxos,  who,  a  generation  later,  obtained  Tiberias  on 
the  Sea  of  Galilee  from  the  Sultan,  and  planted  it  with  mul- 
berry-trees ;  and  most  amazing  of  all  the  pseudo-Messiahs,  Sab- 
batai  Zevi,  whose  only  weapon  was  the  Holy  Name,  to  follow 

231 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

whom  to  Palestine  in  1666,  prosperous  Jews  throughout  Europe 
wound  up  their  affairs.  New  York  itself  has  not  lacked  a 
gatherer  of  Israel,  though  Major  Noah's  inverted  Zionism  led 
him  to  see  the  New  Jerusalem  on  the  Niagara  river.  And  to 
these  heroes  and  mystics  and  megalomaniacs  must  be  added 
the  modern  pamphleteers  who  have  advocated  the  return  to 
Palestine,  the  modern  philanthropists  from  orthodox  Russian 
Rabbis  to  French  millionaires,  who  have  made  the  Holy  Land 
the  scene  of  their  experiments;  the  Chovevi  Zion  Societies 
that  have  sought  to  repeople  it  with  Jews ;  the  "  Biluits  "  and 
other  European  enthusiasts  who  have  torn  at  its  soil  with  their 
fingers  when  spades  were  lacking.  As  early  —  or  as  late  —  as 
the  twelfth  century,  the  Restoration  was  turned  into  a  dogma 
of  the  faith  by  Maimonides,  and  the  thirteenth  article  of  the 
creed,  still  daily  recited,  declares,  eighteen  hundred  and  fifty 
years  after  the  fall  of  Jerusalem,  unbroken  trust  in  the  Mes- 
siah, "  however  his  coming  be  delayed."  And  this  Messiah 
will,  in  the  expectation  of  the  masses,  gather  the  scattered  tribes 
from  the  four  corners  of  the  earth  and  reign  in  glory  over  them 
in  their  own  land.  And  on  that  day,  "  the  Law  shall  go  forth 
from  Zion  and  the  Word  of  the  Lord  from  Jerusalem." 

If  in  modern  Zionism  these  Apocalyptic  visions  have  been 
transformed  into  a  sober  political  movement,  this  is  none  the 
less  spiritual  because  it  looks  to  the  right  hand  of  the  race  — 
and  not  to  the  outstretched  cloudy  arm  —  to  do  the  work  of 
regeneration  and  regathering. 

But  the  "  survival  value  "  of  the  Jew's  faith  in  his  destiny 
was  unaffected  by  the  exact  sense  in  which  he  held  it.  He  was 
confident  of  outliving  the  great  Empires  of  antiquity,  each  of 
which  in  turn  enfolded  him  with  its  colossal  and  capricious  dom- 
inance, and  already  whether  in  the  sense  of  their  creeds  or  their 
kingdoms  he  has  outlived  them  all. 

"When  I  was  last  in  Egypt,"  said  Sir  Herbert  Samuel  in 
the  peroration  of  his  speech  at  the  Maccabaean  banquet  given 
to  him  on  his  departure  to  take  up  the  High  Commissionership 
of  Palestine,  "  I  saw  on  the  monument  of  Menepthah  what  the 
King  had  caused  to  bo  written :  '  Israel  is  wasted  and  his  seed 
is  brought  to  nothing.'  That  was  written  three  thousand  years 
ago:  yet  Israel  is  alive  to-day  in  this  Hall,  for  the  ideal  endures. 
And  our  ideal  is  not  tribal  but  universalistic.  'In  thy  seed 
shall  all  the  nations  of  the  earth  be  blessed.'  So  runs  the 
prophecy ;  and  in  that  spirit  I  set  out  for  the  Holy  Land  of 
Israel." 

282 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

XIX 

The  mere  existence  of  the  Jew  to-day  has  been  a  triumph  of 
idealism;  it  marks  a  dissent  for  the  sake  of  an  idea  from  the 
dominant  forces  of  Asiatic  or  European  civilisation,  a  protes- 
tantism persisted  in  despite  the  ceaseless  persecution  of  all  the 
centuries  of  Pagan  or  Christian  supremacy.  The  real  story  of 
"  The  Wandering  Jew  "  remains,  when  every  deduction  has  been 
made,  the  story  of  camps  of  idealists  entrenched  everywhere  in 
enemy's  country,  practising  (inter  se  at  least)  those  Hebraic 
principles  of  human  brotherhood  which  are  now  only  beginning 
to  work  their  way  from  the  creed  to  the  life  of  Christendom, 
and  organising  existence  round  the  synagogue  and  the  Tal- 
mudical  college  so  democratically  that  the  beggar  considered 
himself  the  equal,  if  not  the  benefactor,  of  the  philanthropist  he 
helped  heavenwards.  The  popular  idea  that  Judaism  has 
remained  stagnant  since  the  birth  of  Christianity  must,  as  I 
have  said,  be  dismissed.  If  Judaism  had  indeed  died  in  the 
birth-pangs  of  Christianity,  if  it  had  only  given  the  impulse  to 
that  great  current  of  emotion  which  has  produced  Catholicism 
and  Protestantism,  stimulated  Mohammedanism,  and  moulded 
the  national  character  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  race  in  Britain, 
Australasia,  and  America,  it  would  have  been  revered  to-day  as 
we  revere  Hellenism.  But  the  Jews,  unlike  the  Hellenes  — 
whose  spiritual  line  of  life  theirs  crossed  thrice,  in  the  creation 
of  the  Septuagint,  of  the  Gospels,  and  of  the  Alexandrian 
philosophy  —  survived  by  a  continuous  tradition  their  greatest 
period,  and,  though  scattered  to  the  four  corners  of  the  earth, 
went  on  developing  their  old  faith  on  its  own  lines,  side  by  side 
with  the  development  of  Christianity,  producing  a  wilderness  of 
codes  and  commentaries,  mysticisms  and  cabbalistic  theosophies, 
poems  and  pseudo-Messianic  movements,  evolving  unique  types 
of  character  and  unique  racial  humours,  and  pouring  out  a 
Hebrew  literature  so  voluminous  that  the  catalogue  for  the  last 
century  alone  fills  an  octavo  volume  of  one  thousand  pages  — 
no  bad  record  for  a  "  dead  race  "  writing  in  a  "  dead  language." 
"  De  sorte  que"  as  Bossuet  said  in  another  connection,  "  il  n'y  a 
pas  un  seul  moment  ou  Mo'ise  et  sa  loi  n'ait  ete  vivante" 
Curiously  intermingled  with  the  picturesque  panorama  of  the 
mediaeval,  bringing  the  mystery  of  the  Orient  and  the  youth  of 
the  world  into  an  atmosphere  of  barons  and  crusaders,  friars 
and  schoolmen,  popes  and  artists,  this  strange  race  moves  —  or 

233 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

rather  is  "  moved  on  " —  across  the  stage  of  the  Christian  era, 
always  fantastic  and  fascinating,  never  out  of  danger  of  pillage 
and  massacre,  always  ground  betwixt  Church  and  State,  always 
the  unavowed  tax-gatherers  for  kings  and  emperors,  every- 
where forced  into  usury,  slowly  changed  from  the  peasant 
warrior  breed,  that  fought  the  Greeks  and  Romans,  into  a  meek 
commercial  people,  forbidden  by  Papal  bulls  to  deal  in  anything 
but  old  clo'  and  old  iron,  stunted  and  contorted  in  soul  and 
body,  bent  from  poring  over  the  Law  or  making  feigned  obeis- 
ance to  the  persecutor,  often  clothed  literally  with  shame  as  a 
garment,  and  finally  shut  up  in  Ghettos ;  yet  always,  somehow, 
somewhere,  rising  through  individuals  to  wealth  and  distinc- 
tion —  viziers  in  Turkey,  hidalgos  in  Christian  Spain  and 
Ministers  of  State  in  Saracenic,  masters  of  the  mint  in  Egypt, 
astronomers  royal  in  Portugal,  royal  physicians  at  every  court 
in  Europe,  putting  forth  a  Maimonides  in  Cordova  and  a 
Spinoza  in  Amsterdam,  and  a  Heine  in  Dusseldorf,  and  finally 
surviving  (with  no  taints  that  two  generations  cannot  efface 
and  a  vitality  that  ten  generations  cannot  impair)  to  attempt 
its  national  renaissance  in  the  Palestine  lost  eighteen  and  a  half 
centuries  ago,  and  to  contribute  who  knows  what  clarified  gospel 
to  a  confused  world.  For  the  stress  of  the  centuries  has 
exhausted  neither  the  intellectual  nor  the  ethical  strain  in  the 
race,  and  while  Bergson,  Freud  and  Einstein  have  revolutionised 
modern  thought,  there  has  glimmered  in  ever}'  country  of  the 
Diaspora,  as  in  France  through  James  Uarmesteter  and  Joseph 
Salvador,  the  dream  of  a  new  prophetic  Judaism,  a  charac- 
teristic example  of  which  has  just  reached  me  in  the  proposal 
of  an  obscure  London  Jew  for  "  A  Covenant  of  Goodness  "  with 
a  Universal  Religion  and  a  Universal  Citizenship  as  the  path  of 
Creative  Peace.  The  Jews,  who,  even  Mr.  Wells  admits,  intro- 
duced into  the  world  two  thousand  four  hundred  years  ago  "  the 
idea  of  the  moral  unity  of  mankind  and  of  a  world-peace  " 
begin  to  recognise  that  they  must  see  it  through. 

XX 

The  Jews  of  America  are  up  in  arms  because  Sargent's  fresco 
in  the  Boston  Library  depicts  Judaism  as  an  unlovely  hag  with 
bandaged  eyes.  In  vain  Sargent  claims  that  he  is  but  following 
the  precedent  of  medieval  cathedrals.  Judaism  to-day  is  no 
blind  bystander.     There  is  Jewish  blood  in  nearly  all  the  young 

234 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

poets  who  have  returned  from  the  trenches  to  picture  to  us  the 
loathsomeness  of  the  process  by  which  Christendom  parcels  out 
the  kingdoms  of  the  world.  It  was  at  the  hands  of  Jewish 
publicists  all  the  world  over  —  from  the  conductors  of  America's 
New  Republic  to  the  Secretary  of  our  Labour  Party's  Advisory 
Committee  on  International  Questions  —  that  the  brazen 
attempt  to  palm  off  the  Paris  ukases  as  the  Wilsonian  Peace- 
Programme  met  with  its  sternest  repudiation.  They  knew  that 
if  "  The  Tiger  "  was  lying  down  with  the  lamb,  it  was  only  —  as 
Dickens  predicted  of  the  lion  —  with  the  lamb  inside,  and  they 
smiled  bitterly  at  the  idea  of  a  new  world-order  emerging  under 
the  aegis  of  a  tribal  politician  whose  very  sobriquet  recalled  the 
law  of  the  jungle. 

In  "  The  Book  of  the  Nations,"  an  American  Jewess,  Miss 
Jessie  Sampter,  has  poured  forth  in  the  very  idiom  of  the  Old 
Testament  her  prophetic  indignation  against  our  modern 
Assyrias  and  Babylons.  At  first  she  will  not  hear  of  nations 
at  all,  and  Israel,  too,  shall  be  destroyed. 

"  I  shall  destroy  the  nations  with  their  own  weapons,  saith  the 
Lord. 

"  I  shall  set  them  upon  one  another  because  they  have  hated  one 
another.  And  each  will  cry  out:  I  have  been  attached,  I  am  inno- 
cent. 

"  Because  they  have  pretended  innocence  when  their  hands  and 
bowels  were  full  of  blood,  and  because  they  have  called  upon  my 
name  in  vain,  using  it  for  war  and  conquest  and  oppression. 

"  This  is  the  day,  saith  the  Lord,  which  I  have  made.  Now  is  the 
day  of  judgment.  It  is  here,  and  you  know  it  not.  I  am  here 
among  you,  consuming  you,  and  you  see  me  not." 

But  as  her  chant  goes  on,  she  becomes  aware  of  the  blankness 
of  a  world  without  nations,  and  Israel  returns  —  like  the 
authoress  herself  —  to  Palestine,  to  become 

"  As  a  watchman  between  the  East  and  the  West, 
To  turn  aside  the  sword  and  to  keep  open  the  way. 

"  And  this  shall  be  for  a  sign:  That  the  nations  shall  set  you  in 
your  land. 

"  And  that  the  sore  and  tired  peoples  will  choose  you  as  a  balm  of 
Gilead. 

"  And  they  shall  say:  This  people  is  for  peace  and  for  health  in  a 
land  full  of  fevers; 

"  This  is  to  save  us  from  the  sword,  from  the  pestilence  of  oppres- 
sion, 

235 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  For  this  is  a  people  that  has  suffered  in  every  land,  wise- 
hearted  with  the  sorroxvs  of  even/  land. 

"  And  in  your  midst  they  will  build  the  palace  of  peace. 
"  And  the  temple  of  justice." 

And  in  London,  an  obscure  Yiddish  writer,  masking  himself 
as  "  Moses,  the  Servant,"  exclaims  rhapsodically :  "  Burn  the 
sun  on  the  altar  of  infinite  love,  offer  the  whole  world  as  a  holo- 
caust on  the  battlefield  of  right!  Break  the  rainbow  in  two, 
make  of  one  half  a  bow  for  Amor,  and  of  the  other  half  a  fiery 
sword  for  Justice !  " 

Another  American  poet,  Mr.  Samuel  Roth,  has  excoriated 
"  Europe  "  with  the  same  large  utterance.  Thus  saith  the 
Lord,  he,  too,  dares  to  begin  in  the  antique  phrase,  though  his 
message  is  ultra-modern.  And  with  the  same  sublime  assurance 
he  exclaims :  "  The  face  of  Israel  will  shine  with  power  when 
Europe  will  be  a  name  difficult  to  remember."  The  voice  of 
Jerusalem  re-echoes  from  France,  where  in  language  of  a  Semitic 
sublimity  M.  Edmond  Fleg  in  his  "  Le  Mur  des  Pleurs,"  gives 
utterance  to  "  Le  Cri  des  Hommes,"  and  proclaims  his  execra- 
tion for  that  God  of  Battles  who  would  resuscitate  the  very 
dead  only  to  renew  the  slaughter: 

"  Sois  maudit:  a  ton  cri,  nos  os  ressuscites, 
S'entre-tuent  dans  le  temps  et  dans  l'eternite ! " 

Perhaps  this  is  the  real  uneasiness  of  Christendom  in  the 
presence  of  the  Jew.  Israel's  emancipation  has  served,  as 
Stevenson  said  of  marriage,  to  "  domesticate  the  Recording 
Angel." 

But  the  Jew  is  not  content  to  record  the  crimes  of  Christen- 
dom. For  him  criticism  is  only  the  negative  aspect  of  creation. 
He  is  out  for  victory.  He  will  verify  the  legend  of  the  Con- 
quering Jew.  With  the  sword  of  the  spirit  he  will  extirpate  the 
heathen.  He  will  overrun  the  planet.  He  will  bring  about  a 
holy  League  of  Nations,  a  Millennium  of  Peace.  For  the 
words  of  the  Babylonian  Isaiah  still  vibrate  in  his  soul  : 

"  I  have  put  My  spirit  upon  him, 
He  shall  make  the  right  to  go  forth  to  the  nations, 
He  shall  not  fail  or  be  crushed 
Till  he  have  set  the  right  in  the  earth, 
And  the  isles  shall  wait  for  his  teaching." 

The  God  whose  spirit  is  thus  interpreted,  the  God  who  uses  a 
people  to  make  the  right  to  go  forth  to  the  nations,  and  who 

236 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

through  faithful  followers  labours  to  establish  His  Kingdom  on 
earth,  may  be  only  a  national  working  hypothesis,  a  divine 
dynamic.  But  the  conception  at  least  makes  the  worship  of  any 
lesser  or  rival  God  impossible,  and  justifies  that  jealousy  for 
His  service  which  inspired  the  anonymous  mediaeval  poet  whose 
verses  are  still  sung  in  the  synagogue  * :  — 

"  All  the  world  shall  come  to  serve  Thee 
And  bless  Thy  glorious  Name, 
And  Thy  righteousness  triumphant 

The  islands  shall  acclaim, 
And  the  peoples  shall  go  seeking 

Who  knew  Thee  not  before, 
And  the  ends  of  earth  shall  praise  Thee 
And  tell  Thy  greatness  o'er. 

"  They  shall  build  for  Thee  their  altars, 
Their  idols  overthrown, 
And  their  graven  gods  shall  shame  them, 

As  they  turn  to  Thee  alone. 
They  shall  worship  Thee  at  sunrise, 

And  feel  Thy  Kingdom's  might, 
And  impart  their  understanding 
To  those  astray  in  night. 

"  They  shall  testify  Thy  greatness, 

And  of  Thy  power  speak, 
And  extol  Thee,  shrined,  uplifted 

Beyond  man's  highest  peak, 
And  with  reverential  homage, 
Of  love  and  wonder  born, 
With  the  ruler's  crown  of  beauty 
Thy  head  they  shall  adorn. 

"  With  the  coming  of  Thy  Kingdom 

The  hills  shall  break  into  song, 

And  the  islands  laugh  exultant 

That  they  to  God  belong. 

And  all  their  congregations 

So  loud  Thy  praise  shall  sing, 

That  the  uttermost  peoples,  hearing, 

Shall  hail  Thee  crowned  King." 

i  From  the  author's  version  in  "  Service  of  the  Synagogue,"  by  kind  per- 
mission of  Messrs.  Routledge  and  Son. 

237 


SHYLOCK  AND  OTHER  STAGE  JEWS 


In  some  of  the  United  States  the  Jews  have  successfully 
petitioned  for  the  removal  of  "  The  Merchant  of  Venice  "  from 
the  school  curriculum.  Their  objection,  though  it  would  bar 
out  some  of  the  greatest  poetry  in  the  language,  is  not  so 
unreasonable  when  it  is  remembered  that  as  a  Christian  lady  put 
it  for  her  social  class :  "  Shylock  is  the  only  Jew  most  of  us 
know  personally."  Moreover,  since  only  one  or  two  Shake- 
spearean plays  can  figure  in  the  scholastic  repertory,  there  is 
no  reason  to  select  precisely  the  one  which  perpetuates  Judaeo- 
phobia. 

It  might  be  added  that  this  play  is  calculated  to  give  the 
child  as  erroneous  notions  of  Law  as  of  the  Children  of  Israel. 
I  could  pass  over  the  irregular  procedure  by  which  a  young 
lady,  obviously  breaking  the  sartorial  law  of  sex,  and  armed 
with  an  untruthful  introduction  from  an  absentee  judge,  is 
alloAved  to  officiate  at  once  as  plaintiff,  pleader,  preacher,  arbi- 
trator, assessor,  sentencer,  and  Christian  conversionist.  But 
imagine  any  judge  in  the  great  city  of  the  Doges  putting  forth 
such  nonsense  as  that  if  a  pound  of  flesh  is  owing  to  you,  you 
cannot,  save  on  pain  of  death,  cut  less  than  a  pound,  even  by 
the  twentieth  part  of  a  scruple.  More,  I  grant  you,  would  be 
illegal.  But  less?  A  capital  offence  to  take  less  than  your 
debt?  Shylock  could  surely  have  cut  safely  on  the  ca'  canny 
side.  As  for  Portia's  brazen  contention  that  the  pound  of  flesh 
carried  with  it  no  drop  of  blood,  any  butcher  could  have  told 
her  the  contrary.  But  perhaps  Shakespeare's  silliness  was  as 
feigned  as  Hamlet's  madness.  Perhaps  he  was  sardonically 
forecasting  the  future  of  the  legal  profession  after  the  passing 
of  the  Women's  Enabling  Act.  Or,  more  probably,  he  was 
satirising  the  influence  of  anti-alien  prejudice  upon  the  judicial 
mind.  The  bench  of  England  is  proverbially  the  seat  of  incor- 
ruptible justice.  Decisions  have  been  given  recently  even 
against  the  Crown  that  recall  the  noblest  traditions  of  British 
judicature.  Nevertheless,  the  bench  has  not  utterly  escaped 
the  insidious  influences  of  war-fever  and  not  a  few  anti-alien 

238 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

decisions  as  grotesque  as  Portia's  have  blotted  its  record. 
Englishmen  cannot  ponder  too  deeply  the  great  saying  put  into 
Shylock's  mouth  by  the  national  bard : 

"  If  you  deny  me,  fie  upon  your  Law ! 
There  is  no  force  in  the  decrees  of  Venice." 

It  is  a  saying  which  entirely  upsets  the  low-comedy  concep- 
tion of  Shylock,  which  has  still  its  defenders.  Indeed,  with  the 
elision  of  a  few  lines  —  to  me  of  dubious  authenticity  —  Shylock 
could  be  turned  from  an  impossible  monster  into  one  of  the 
finest  of  Shakespeare's  creations. 

A  popular  stage  anecdote  recounts  how  Macklin  puzzled  the 
critics  and  the  crowd  by  playing  Shylock  for  the  first  time  not 
as  a  low-comedy  ogre  but  as  a  human  being,  and  how  Pope 
closed  the  controversy  by  his  pronouncement : 

"  This  is  the  Jew 
That  Shakespeare  drew." 

It  was  not,  however,  till  the  performance  by  Edmund  Kean  — 
who  replaced  the  Judas-beard  by  a  black  —  that  the  full  dignity 
of  Shakespeare's  creation  was  revealed.     And  Kean  was  a  Jew. 

Of  the  five  Shylocks  I  have  seen,  four  have  had  more  or  less 
Jewish  blood:  Moscovitch  (a  hundred  per  cent.),  Tree  (fifty) 
and  Bourchier  and  Irving  (say,  twenty-five  each).  But  the 
fifth,  whose  blood  is  purely  Scotch  —  Matheson  Lang  —  was  to 
me  the  most  sympathetic  of  them  all,  possibly  because  he  made 
his  first  appearance  in  his  own  house,  transferring  to  an  interior 
the  bargain  with  Bassanio  and  Antonio,  which,  by  stage  direc- 
tion, occurs  in  "  a  public  place."  And  in  getting  inside  that 
house  of  which  all  previous  audiences  have  seen  only  the  door 
through  which  Jessica  eloped,  and  the  window  through  which 
she  dropped  the  stolen  jewels  to  her  Christian  gallant,  we  seemed 
also  for  the  first  time  to  see  Shylock  from  within.  As  the 
Englishman's  house  was  his  castle,  so  the  Jew's  house  was  his 
synagogue.  Here,  kissed  by  the  Princess  Sabbath,  the  dog,  in 
Heine's  phrase,  became  a  man.  But  this  secret  of  the  Ghetto 
was  only  imperfectly  divined  by  Shakespeare,  in  whose  days 
England  knew  no  professing  Jews.  I  would  have  Shylock  dis- 
covered poring  over  some  old  Talmudic  folio,  or  at  some  pictur- 
esque ceremony  with  wine  cup  and  spice  box,  and  Jessica 
holding  the  taper.  Mr.  Lang  has  not  ventured  so  far  as  that, 
but  he  gives  us  Jessica  flitting  about  the  home,  so  that  we  can 

239 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

for  the  first  time  realise  her  flight  as  a  tragedy  for  her  father, 
not  as  a  mere  comedy  for  the  gay  Venetians. 

It  has  been  curiously  overlooked  that  Shylock  demands  his 
"  pound  of  flesh  "  only  after  he  has  been  robbed  of  his  daughter 
and  of  his  treasures,  and  outraged  in  his  deepest  instincts  by 
her  baptism.  He  is  now  practically  insane  with  lust  for 
vengeance,  and  from  that  point  Shylock  should  be  played  as  a 
morbid  will  and  a  deranged  intellect,  with  all  the  remorseless 
logic  of  the  monomaniac.  Hazlitt,  according  to  the  late  Dutton 
Cook,  described  Shylock  as  "  a  man  brooding  over  one  idea." 
Hazlitt  said  exactly  the  opposite  —  such  is  the  reliability  of 
even  the  best  dramatic  critics  —  but  the  description  misattrib- 
uted  to  him  is  true  for  the  second  part  of  the  story.  The 
opening  Shylock,  however,  is  neither  a  mean  usurer,  nor  a 
brooding  fiend,  nor  a  pathological  figure,  but  a  deeply  intel- 
lectual Jew,  probably  of  Spanish  origin  and  Spanish  pride, 
devoted  to  his  daughter  and  his  dead  wife.  And  this  spiritual 
self-sufficiency  —  which  Irving's  too  pathetic  performance 
missed  —  Mr.  Lang  realised. 

But  did  not  then  Shylock  plot  to  trap  Antonio  into  this  mon- 
strous bargain,  to  "catch  him  on  the  hip"?  My  answer  is, 
"  No,  he  made  the  bargain  out  of  a  superb  disdain  for  the 
money-seeking  Christians."  These  flamboyant  prodigals  flouted 
his  thrift,  taunted  him  with  usury,  spat  upon  his  gaberdine, 
reviled  him  for  a  "  cut-throat  dog."  Very  well,  he  would  lend 
them  the  three  thousand  ducats  for  nothing,  nay,  for  something 
less  valuable  than  nothing,  a  pound  of  their  own  flesh. 

It  was  a  piece  of  panache  as  of  a  Cyrano  de  Bergerac,  no 
deep-laid  plot,  but  the  inspiration  of  an  ironic  moment.  As  a 
plot  indeed  it  would  have  been  unworthy  of  a  schoolboy,  not  to 
say  a  shrewd  calculating  financier.  Antonio,  to  cover  these 
three  thousand  ducats,  had  no  less  than  four  argosies  out,  with 
other  "  miscellaneous  ventures."  The  chances  that  all  these 
would  make  shipwreck  were  infinitesimal.  Ask  any  marine 
insurance  broker,  enquire  at  Lloyd's,  what  was  the  chance  of 
Shylock  getting  his  pound  of  flesh.  It  was  practically  nil. 
And  this  without  allowing  for  the  probability  of  Antonio  or 
Bassanio  borrowing  the  money  from  another  source,  Christian 
or  Jewish.  But  the  audience,  knowing  beforehand  that  the 
wildly  improbable  xvill  happen,  reads  the  malignity  of  the  sequel 
into  the  mere  mocking  contract,  the  ironic  revenge  of  the  Jew- 
dog,  when  the  grand  signors  who  have  spat  upon  him  must 
stoop  to  his  money  bags. 

240 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

And  with  this  irony  went  also,  so  oddly  is  human  nature  com- 
pounded, a  desire  for  the  love  and  respect  of  these  lordly  Chris- 
tians —  when  has  a  Jew  not  coveted  that?  Shylock  has  cleared 
his  bosom  of  the  rankling  tale  of  his  wrongs  —  were  he  trapping 
Antonio  resentment  is  the  last  thing  he  would  have  betrayed  — 
and  now  he  is  ready  for  a  new  relation.  Flattered  by  the 
friendliness  of  the  Venetians,  he  even  relaxes  his  rigid  piety. 
He  goes  to  supper  with  them,  and  it  is  while  he  is  at  supper 
that  —  by  what  the  orthodox  Jew  would  regard  as  a  nemesis  — 
the  catastrophe  of  his  daughter's  abandonment  falls  on  him. 
To  his  tragic  frenzy  the  contract  devised  in  irony  now  appears 
the  way  to  vengeance.  Here  is  a  consistent  characterisation, 
here  a  genuine  dramatic  development. 


H 

I  am  well  aware  that  there  are  passages  that  make  against 
this  reading,  which  do  show  Shylock  as  a  scheming  devil,  plan- 
ning for  his  pound  of  flesh  in  cold  blood,  but  they  are  enor- 
mously outweighed  by  the  passages  which  make  the  diabolical 
reading  impossible.  The  fact  is  that  the  text  offers  us  two 
discrepant  Shylocks.  But  the  passage  upon  which  the  case  for 
the  scheming  devil  mainly  rests,  is  a  long  "  aside  "  lugged  in  at 
a  most  improbable  moment,  in  the  very  presence  of  Antonio  and 
Bassanio,  who  were  to  be  caught  napping,  and  contains,  more- 
over, the  statement  that  Antonio  lends  money  gratis  —  a  state- 
ment which  Antonio  (who  is  supposed  not  to  hear  it)  contradicts 
in  his  first  speech.  True,  this  same  self-contradiction  occurs 
earlier,  but  even  the  careless  Bard  of  Avon  would  not  be  likely 
to  contradict  himself  within  the  compass  of  a  few  lines.  It  is 
not  impossible  that  the  "  aside  "  was  inserted  by  the  commercial 
manager  (who  had  commissioned  the  play)  to  offset  Shake- 
speare's unexpected  humanisation  of  the  Jew.  For,  as  Sir 
Sidney  Lee  has  surmised,  the  "  Merchant  of  Venice  "  was  prob- 
ably written  to  exploit  the  popular  odium  for  the  Jew  arising 
from  the  hanging,  drawing  and  quartering  of  the  converted  Jew, 
Rodrigo  Lopez,  the  Queen's  Physician,  on  the  charge  of  com- 
plicity in  a  conspiracy  to  poison  Elizabeth.  Written  post- 
haste as  a  topical  "  money-maker,"  at  any  rate  produced  within 
three  months  of  the  Jew's  execution,  it  blessed,  like  Balaam, 
where  it  should  have  cursed,  and  closely  though  it  kept  to  the 
old  story  or  play  on  which  it  was  founded,  it  was  yet  subtly 

241 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

transformed.  For  Shakespeare  was  not  only  the  hack 
dramatist,  he  was  also  Shakespeare.  And  Shakespeare  was  — 
in  the  language  of  Xovalis  — "  at  one  with  nature."  Though, 
as  Carlyle  said,  "  His  great  soul  had  to  crush  itself  as  it  could 
into  the  mould  of  the  Globe  Theatre,"  his  genius  could  no  more 
tell  a  lie  than  George  Washington.  Moreover,  as  a  ruthless 
collector  of  his  own  private  debts,  his  subconscious  sympathy 
went  with  Shylock's  argumentation.  Hence  these  discrepancies, 
hence  these  traces  of  an  earlier  type  and  play  left  crudely 
standing  —  or  re-inserted  managerially  —  in  contradiction  of 
the  new  Shylock  his  universal  humanity  had  evolved. 

But  these  stumbling-blocks,  though  they  found  their  way  into 
the  text  printed  without  consultation  with  Shakespeare,  must 
be  boldly  removed,  if  Shylock  is  to  remain  credible  to  the  modern 
mind.  Every  age,  it  has  been  truly  said,  re-interprets  the  old 
masterpieces.  It  is  not  so  important  what  Shakespeare  meant 
as  what  he  might  mean  to  us.  It  is  not  as  if  the  Jew's  demand 
for  a  pound  of  flesh  rested  on  any  historic  foundation.  The 
story  comes  from  Hindu  mythology.  It  cropped  up  in  England 
in  the  "  Cursor  Mundi,"  and  in  the  old  ballad  of  "  Ser  Gernutus, 
the  Jew  of  Venice."  Eight  years  before  Shakespeare  was  born, 
it  figured  in  an  Italian  collection,  "  II  Pecarone."  When  he 
was  fifteen,  it  was  dramatised  as  "  The  Jew."  But  out  of 
eleven  versions  of  the  stor}'  in  the  world's  literature,  four  have 
no  Jew  at  all.  Na}r,  in  the  only  version  purporting  to  be  his- 
toric —  for  it  is  related  in  Letti's  History  of  Pope  Sixtus  V. — 
it  is  the  Christian,  "  the  Merchant  of  Rome,"  who  demands  the 
pound  of  flesh  from  the  Jew!  The  Jew  as  creditor  only 
appeared  in  an  English  version  at  the  very  time  the  race  was 
being  banished  from  England.  (In  a  Japanese  version  I  have 
seen,  it  is  not  a  pound  but  a  square  foot  of  flesh.) 

With  a  myth  so  floating  and  mutable  an  artist  may  do  what 
he  will.  It  was  only  fastened  on  the  Jew  as  all  jokes  are  ulti- 
mately fathered  on  Punch.  But  that  was  a  bad  psychological 
blunder.  The  Jew  was  the  last  person  the  legend  should  have 
been  fastened  on.  The  Bible  forbids  him  to  cut  even  from  the 
living  flesh  of  an  animal,  and  a  man  capable  of  cutting  from  a 
living  Christian  was  never  born  of  Jewish  woman.  He  were  as 
much  a  monster  as  the  comic  demon  whom  Macklin  drove  from 
the  stage.  Sufferance  is  the  badge  of  all  our  tribe,  as  Shake- 
speare rightly  divined.  The  Jew  survives  not  by  force  but  by 
brain-power  and  the  "  patient  shrug." 

Even,  therefore,  if  Matheson  Lang's  Shylock  did  not  exist  in 

242 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Shakespeare,  it  had  to  be  invented.  If  every  age  re-interprets 
its  old  masterpieces,  that  is  practically  rewriting  them.  The 
recognised  licence  to  cut  Shakespeare  —  which  subtly  changes 
all  the  proportions  —  should  be  supplemented  by,  indeed,  it 
requires,  a  complementary  licence  to  add  and  readjust.  Mr. 
Lang  allowed  Jessica  to  kiss  her  father's  hand  —  Irving  intro- 
duced the  knocking  at  the  door  of  the  deserted  home.  Tree 
grovelled  on  the  ground,  rent  his  garments  and  poured  ashes  on 
his  head;  Bourchier  (and  probably  all  the  others)  brought  back 
the  Venetian  revellers  to  accentuate  the  tragedy  —  it  were  no 
great  transition  to  add  a  line  or  two  of  speech  to  all  this 
gesture-language.  But  in  any  case  Shylock  must  be  made 
plausible.  And  that  can  be  done  only  if  the  flight  of  his 
daughter  is  made  the  dividing  line  between  Shylock  sober  and 
Shylock  drunk  for  vengeance.  The  impossible  "  aside  "  must 
be  eliminated  —  Mr.  Lang  merely  slurs  over  it.  Apart  from  its 
absurdity,  it  is  a  great  artistic  flaw,  for  if  even  before  Jessica's 
treachery  Shylock  was  meditating  so  diabolical  a  revenge  on  the 
heathen,  the  whole  episode  and  all  his  sufferings  become  artis- 
tically meaningless.  That  is  hardly  the  method  of  a  master 
craftsman,  whose  every  stroke  has  significance,  whose  tragedy  is 
always  cumulative. 

Nor  is  the  change  that  I  propose  the  first  "  The  Merchant  of 
Venice  "  has  undergone.  Ever  since  Shylock  became  a  serious 
character,  the  comedy  of  the  Venetian  Christians  has  been 
thrown  out  of  focus.  The  new  rendering  deranges  it  still  more. 
Impossible  after  Shylock's  tragic  exit  to  restore  the  gaiety  as  it 
was  restored,  or  rather  renewed,  when  the  bafflement  of  the 
comic  demon  was  but  the  preparation  for  the  happy  ending 
and  the  delicious  poetry  of  the  moonlit  close.  And  yet  it  is  not 
against  nature  that  the  merry  Venetians,  having  wronged  a 
greater  soul  than  their  own,  should  turn  blithely  and  uncon- 
sciously to  their  own  debonair  life,  that  the  stars  should  look 
down  in  their  splendour  on  an  old  Jew's  broken  heart.  Only 
there  is  an  irony  greater  even  than  Shakespeare  saw,  ironically 
and  nobly  as  he  rose  above  the  prejudice  of  his  age. 

in 

My  friend,  Mr.  William  Poel,  criticising  this  reading  of  Shy- 
lock, objects  that  Jessica  (Act  III.  Sc.  2)  testifies  that  even 
when  she  was  with  her  father,  she  heard  him  tell  Tubal  that  he 

243 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

would  rather  have  Antonio's  flesh  than  twenty  times  the  value 
of  the  debt.  But  who  can  believe  Jessica,  the  most  detestable 
and  the  least  Jewish  character  in  all  fiction?  She  is  capable  of 
saying  anything  to  please  her  Christian  friends.  There  is  even 
less  substance  in  Mr.  Poel's  further  objection  that  Shylock  was 
not  "  robbed  "  of  Jessica,  because  her  elopement  was  voluntary. 
As  if  Shylock's  feeling  that  he  had  been  robbed  would  be  les- 
sened by  a  consideration  like  that,  especially  in  days  when 
daughters  had  no  rights !  Mr.  Poel's  own  view  is  that  the  play 
was  written  as  a  commercial  counterblast  to  "  The  Jew  of 
Malta  "  in  which  Marlowe  "  bitterly  accused  the  Christians  of 
lacking  candour,  honesty,  and  every  Christian  virtue."  Shake- 
speare cannily  desired  to  show  "  the  other  side  of  the  question." 
But  I  look  in  vain  in  "  The  Jew  of  Malta  "  for  Marlowe's 
indictment  of  the  Christian.  In  so  far  as  it  was  put  in  the 
Jew's  own  mouth, 

"  For  I  can  see  no  fruits  in  all  their  faith 
But  malice,  falsehood  and  excessive  pride  " — 

it  would  have  been  discounted  by  the  audience.  And  per  contra 
the  sophistication  with  which  the  Christians  covered  their  crimes 
would  have  evoked  a  concordant  echo.  We  hear  indeed  the 
self-righteous  accent  of  Bolshevism  in  the  Christian  defence. 

"Barabas:  Will  you  then  steal  my  goods? 
Is  theft  the  ground  of  your  religion? 

"  Governor  of  Malta:   No,  Jew,  we  take  particularly  thine 
To  save  the  ruin  of  a  multitude: 
And  better  one  want  for  the  common  good 
Than  many  perish  for  a  private  man." 

This  sophistication  was,  however,  almost  superfluous  in  view 
of  the  ogreish  anti-Christianity  of  Barabas.  A  play  which 
ends  in  a  Jew-monster  being  boiled  alive  can  hardly  be  called  an 
attack  on  the  Christians ;  the  venom  attributed  to  the  Jew  was 
enough  to  rouse  their  passions  to  boiling  point. 

Moreover  the  hypothesis  that  Shakespeare's  play  was  a  com- 
mercial counterblast  to  Marlowe's  has  to  meet  the  passages  in 
which  Shylock  (not  to  mention  the  course  of  the  fable)  likewise 
exposes  the  unchristianity  of  the  Christians.  The  fact  is,  as 
Mr.  Poel  admits,  that  "  The  Merchant  of  Venice  "  is  "  illogical 
and  unsatisfactory  as  a  work  of  art."  Forced,  then,  to  choose 
between  Shakespeare's  self-contradictions,  which  passages  shall 
we  eliminate  to  make  a  consistent  whole? 

244 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

The  method  of  Mr.  Moscovitch  was,  as  he  told  me,  to  play 
all  the  contradictions,  leaving  the  onus  of  them  on  Shakespeare, 
it  being  the  duty  of  an  actor,  he  observed  —  astonishing  but 
admirable  maxim !  —  to  be  faithful  to  his  author.  "  I  grope 
my  way  like  a  blind  man  from  scene  to  scene,"  he  explained,  and 
it  is  sufficient  proof  that  no  general  view  of  the  character  is 
possible,  without  the  cuts  I  have  suggested.  The  part  of 
Jessica  moreover  ought  to  be  rewritten;  so  heartless  and  dis- 
honest a  jade  could  scarcely  be  found  in  a  Christian  household, 
much  less  in  a  Jewish,  with  its  closer  domesticity.  Marlowe's 
Abigail,  the  daughter  of  Barabas,  is  much  nearer  the  true 
psychology. 

"  Not  for  myself,  but  aged  Barabas : 
Father,  for  thee  lamenteth  Abigail." 

And  this  excellent  Jewish  daughter  not  only  does  not  despise 
her  father  but  sets  herself  to  recapture  his  hidden  treasure: 

"  Ten  thousand  portagues,  besides  great  pearls 
Rich  costly  jewels  and  stones  infinite." 

It  is  assuredly  from  this  couple  that  Shakespeare  drew  his  less 
convincing  twain : 

"  O  girl !     O  gold !     O  beauty !     O  my  bliss  !  " 

This  is  the  obvious  source  of 

"  My  daughter!     O  my  ducats!     O  my  daughter!  " 

It  is  equally  the  source  of  Scott's  Isaac  of  York  and  of  that 
Rebecca  whose  original  has  been  sought  so  superfluously  in 
living  models.  The  contrast  of  the  abhorred  old  Jew  with  the 
beautiful  young  Jewess,  coveted  of  Christendom,  was  too  artistic 
a  trouvaille  to  be  lightly  thrown  away. 

IV 

Barabas,  menaced  with  the  loss  of  his  estate,  yet  refuses  to  be 
a  "  convertite."  And  Marlowe  has  no  lack  of  other  Hebraic 
touches.  Yet  it  is  in  Shakespeare  alone  that  we  find  the  real 
differentia  of  the  Jew  as  a  member  of  society : 

"  I  will  buy  with  you,  and  sell  with  you,  talk  with  you,  walk  with 

245 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

you,  and  so  following;  but  I  will  not  eat  with  you,  drink  with  you, 
nor  pray  with  you." 

It  is  odd  that  so  obvious  a  point  should  be  so  absent  from 
literature.  Yet  it  does  not  appear  even  in  "  Nathan  der 
Weise,"  a  play  which  like  Cumberland's  "  The  Jew,"  substitutes 
a  monster  of  goodness  for  Shakespeare's  and  Marlowe's  mon- 
sters of  evil.  It  is  interesting  how  much  more  vitalised  are  the 
creations  of  hate  than  the  creations  of  love.  Cumberland's 
hero  has  not  even  Lessing's  poetry  to  veil  his  goody-goodiness. 

Doubtless  Lessing's  noble-minded  drama  will  always  have  a 
place  in  the  history  of  German  literature  and  of  the  modern 
spirit.  But  as  a  piece  of  art  the  play  surely  does  not  wear 
well ;  it  is  too  compact  of  duologues,  and  the  end,  with  its  com- 
plex discoveries  of  literal  brotherhoods,  is  feeble  and  is  more 
suited  to  Boccaccio  or  to  Shakespearean  comedy  than  to  the 
high  theme  of  the  human  brotherhood.  And  the  draughtsman- 
ship of  Nathan  is  not  specifically  Jewish,  even  though  we  know 
he  was  modelled  on  Moses  Mendelssohn.  There  was  a  side  of 
Mendelssohn  which  Lessing,  despite  his  close  friendship  with 
the  sage  of  Berlin,  could  scarcely  grasp.  But  perhaps  Lessing 
did  well  to  accentuate  —  against  current  prejudice  and  Chris- 
tian bigotry  —  the  more  universal  attributes  of  the  ideal 
Israelite:  his  unique  tolerance,  wisdom,  and  charity.  "The 
righteous  of  all  nations  have  a  share  in  Paradise,"  says  the 
Jewish  prayer-book,  and  since  the  parable  is  also  a  character- 
istically Jewish  method  of  teaching,  it  was  true  portraiture  in 
the  highest  sense  to  put  into  Nathan's  mouth  the  famous  fable 
of  the  three  rings,  which  for  the  rest  occurs  in  early  Rabbinic 
literature.  But  the  remainder  of  the  picture  is  shadowy,  in  the 
Mohammedan  and  Christian  details,  no  less  than  in  the  Jewish. 

And  yet  the  period  and  the  Court  of  Saladin  gave  Lessing 
the  chance  of  introducing  a  magnificent  figure  —  the  mediaeval 
philosopher,  and  refugee  from  Spain,  Maimonides,  Saladin's 
own  physician.  A  famous  letter  from  this  thinker  of  the 
synagogue,  whose  thought  dominated  the  Middle  Ages  and 
nourished  even  the  Dominican  intellect,  gives  the  whole  Islamic 
environment  which  Lessing  might  have  reproduced  for  us. 

"  I  reside  in  Egypt;  the  King  resides  in  Cairo,  which  lies  about 
two  Sabbath-day  journeys  from  the  first-named  place.  My  duties 
to  my  King  are  very  heavy.  I  am  obliged  to  visit  him  every  day, 
early  in  the  morning;  and  when  he  or  any  of  his  eliildren,  or  the  in- 
mates of  the  harem,  are  indisposed,  I  dare  not  quit  Cairo,  but  must 

24C 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

stay,  during  the  greater  part  of  the  day,  in  the  palace.  It  also  fre- 
quently happens  that  one  or  two  of  the  royal  officers  fall  sick,  and 
then  I  have  to  attend  them.  As  a  rule,  I  go  to  Cairo  very  early  in 
the  day,  and,  even  if  nothing  unusual  happens,  I  do  not  return  be- 
fore the  afternoon,  when  I  am  almost  dead  with  hunger;  but  I  find 
the  ante-chambers  filled  with  Jews  and  Gentiles,  with  nobles  and 
common  people,  awaiting  my  return  .   .   ." 

And  what  was  true  of  Saladin's  Court  at  Cairo  must  have 
held  good  for  Jerusalem,  then  equally  sealed  of  the  great 
Mussulman. 

It  is  from  lack  of  concrete  Jewish  characterisation  that 
another  poetic  drama,  which  may  survive,  fails  to  rise  beyond 
nominal  Jewishness.  This  is  the  "  Herod  "  of  Stephen  Phillips, 
whose  Jerusalem  is  as  little  of  the  time  of  Christ  as  Lessing's  is 
of  the  era  of  Saladin.  Towards  the  end  of  "  Herod  "  the 
mob  —  till  then  indistinguishable  from  a  Shakespearean  Roman 
mob  —  recall  the  Lord  their  God,  who  brought  them  out  of 
Egypt,  out  of  the  house  of  bondage.  What  a  dramatic  thrill 
the  poet  has  given  us  here :  what  a  sense  of  the  romance  of 
history :  of  the  miracle  of  "  the  peculiar  people,"  still  as 
entangled  with  the  Caesars  of  to-day  as  they  then  were  with 
Antony  and  Pompey,  and  as  they  had  been  with  Pharaoh  and 
Cyrus.  Why  did  he  not  insist  earlier  upon  this  specific  thread 
of  colour  and  characterisation?  It  would  have  transfigured 
his  whole  work,  and  helped  to  give  it  that  sense  of  reality  which 
it  so  sorely  needs.  Mr.  Phillips  has  selected  away  everything 
but  the  barest  humanity,  the  essential  poetry,  of  his  theme  — 
a  form  of  art  permissible  enough,  yet  scarcely  serving  to  place 
him  with  Shakespeare,  or  even  with  Rostand,  as  some  critics  of 
the  day  believed.  There  are  more  affinities  with  the  earlier 
Maeterlinck. 

"  Herod  "  in  some  sort  combines  the  merits  of  two  schools 
of  art :  it  unites  classic  form  with  Elizabethan  ecstasy ;  the  unity 
of  Space  of  Racine  with  the  native  wood-notes  wild  of  the  lyric 
poet.  The  poet  has  written  beautiful  lines  and  devised  a  series 
of  ironic  tableaux  vivants,  the  best  thing  that  wherein  Herod 
has  no  lines  at  all.  But  Herod,  Mariamne  and  Aristobulus, 
are  merely  the  A,  B  and  C  of  a  dramatic  positipn.  Who 
realises  for  a  moment  that  Aristobulus  is  High  Priest,  that  he 
has  any  connection  with  the  Temple  ritual?  It  is  all  a  poem, 
far  beyond  the  average  of  our  stage,  and  anybody  who  missed 
the  last  act  of  "  Herod  "  deprived  himself  of  a  unique  stage- 
memory.     But  O  for  a  touch  of  local  colour !     Jerusalem,  after 

247 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

all,  is  a  magic  word.  It  ought  not  to  mean  the  mere  No  Man's 
Land  of  poetry.  Shakespeare  had,  in  England  at  least,  no 
opportunity  of  observing  Jewish  life,  since  overt  Jews  in 
England  there  were  none.  But  for  Stephen  Phillips  the  material 
lay  at  hand,  both  corporeally  and  through  a  mass  of  garnered 
history. 

But  in  place  of  the  picturesqueness  and  variety  of  the  truth, 
the  comedy  and  colour  of  actual  history,  one  gets  only  the  rigid 
outlines  of  the  pseudo-classic  play.  One  must  not  make  the 
author  responsible  for  the  immortal  poster  put  forward  by  the 
theatre,  with  the  prophetically  dated  Judaeo-Roman  coin  of  "  40 
B.C." !  But  what  a  picture,  had  Stephen  Phillips  possessed 
a  sense  of  history,  one  might  have  had  of  the  Jewish  world  just 
before  the  coming  of  Christ;  the  schools  and  doctors  of  the 
Law,  the  young  zealots  of  the  faith  yearning  to  tear  down  the 
Roman  eagles  from  the  city  gate,  the  pious  and  not  always 
hypocritical  Pharisees,  the  Sadducees  with  their  aristocratic 
temper  and  their  denial  of  immortality,  the  Essenes  with  their 
noble  simplicity. 

It  was  under  Herod  that  the  great  Jewish  sage,  Hillel,  had 
his  being:  Hillel,  the  announcer,  if  in  obverse  form,  of  "  the 
Golden  Rule  "  which,  like  most  other  good  things,  has  been  an- 
nexed by  the  adjective  "  Christian."  The  mere  juxtaposition 
of  the  philosophical  saint  and  the  pre-Nietzschean  Tetrarch, 
"  beyond  good  and  evil  "  would  have  been  rarely  dramatic. 
But  there  was  actual  contact.  Before  Herod  left  Jerusalem  to 
present  himself  to  Octavianus,  the  conqueror  of  Antony  —  the 
leave-taking  is  actually  pictured  in  Mr.  Phillips's  play  —  he 
appointed  this  unknown  Babylonian,  Hillel,  to  be  one  of  the 
Presidents  of  the  Sanhedrin,  and  this  appointment  influenced 
the  whole  future  of  the  religion.  What  a  chance  missed  of  at 
least  making  Hillel  cross  the  scene:  ay,  and  with  him,  his  great 
rival,  Shammai.  These  two  figures,  whose  discussions  and 
conflicting  schools  loom  so  large  in  the  Talmud,  would  have 
served  to  supply  the  true  atmosphere  of  old  Jerusalem.  Herod 
appointed  Menahem  to  be  Hillel's  deputy,  and  Menahem  was  an 
Essene,  so  that  through  him  an  atmosphere,  akin  to  that  of  the 
coming  Christianity,  might  have  wafted  into  the  tragedy. 

And  apart  from  these  heroic  figures  and  spiritual  suggestions, 
and  the  further  crossing  of  Herod's  line  of  life  with  Cleopatra's, 
the  gallery  of  the  monster's  own  household,  as  painted  by 
Josephus,  provides  a  panorama  of  comedy  personages  who 
could  have  filled  the  scene  with  a  Shakespearean  palpitation  of 

248 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

flesh  and  blood.  The  poor  homicidal  despot  had  no  easy  time 
among  all  the  varied  results  of  his  ten  marriages,  complicated 
by  the  contrariness  of  his  brother  Phenoras,  his  sister  Salome, 
and  his  mother-in-law,  Alexandra.  The  ill-natured  Salome,  for 
example,  was  constantly  carrying  tittle-tattle  against  Mari- 
amne's  sons,  "  that  they  hated  their  father,  and  were  continu- 
ally threatening,  that  if  they  once  got  the  kingdom,  they  would 
make  Herod's  sons  by  his  former  wives  country  schoolmasters, 
for  that  the  present  education  which  was  given  them,  and  their 
diligence  in  learning,  fitted  them  for  such  an  employment. 
And  as  for  the  women,  whenever  they  saw  them  adorned  with 
their  mother's  clothes,  they  threatened  that  instead  of  their 
present  gaudy  apparel,  they  should  be  clothed  in  sackcloth, 
and  confined  so  closely  that  they  should  not  see  the  light  of 
the  sun." 

But  perhaps  the  poet's  dodging  of  all  true  detail  is  inten- 
tional. He  may  have  feared  to  wound  religious  susceptibilities, 
whether  Jewish  or  Christian.  Moreover,  from  the  amusing 
anxiety  of  the  author  of  the  admirable  pamphlet  put  forth  at 
the  first  production  by  Her  Majesty's  Theatre,  to  show  that 
Herod  was  not  a  "  Biblical  "  person :  from  his  grave  warning 
that  Herod  was  not  the  Herod  Antipas,  before  whom  Jesus  was 
sent  by  Pilate  to  be  tried,  it  is  obvious  that  the  poet  felt  him- 
self cramped  by  the  censorship  which  still  exercised  its  auto- 
matic objection  to  "  Biblical "  figures,  and  that  the  public 
which  flocked  to  every  indecent  fatuous  spectacle  accepted  the 
embargo  as  a  mark  of  reverence.  Herod  is  only  "  mentioned 
once  "  in  the  Gospels  —  even  that  mention,  says  the  pamphlet 
(with  an  unconscious  Irish  irreverence  just  where  it  means  to 
be  most  reverent),  is  not  endorsed  by  Josephus.  The  Phari- 
sees, then,  I  suppose,  were  banned,  because  they  are  mentioned 
several  times.  Herod,  by  belonging  mainly  to  the  blank  page 
between  the  Old  and  New  Testament,  became  fit  material  for 
the  dramatist,  while  had  he  belonged  to  either  section  his 
appearance  on  the  stage  would  have  been  blasphemous.  No 
more  delicious  reductio  ad  absurdwm  of  the  recent  English  atti- 
tude towards  the  personages  of  Jewish  History  could  have  been 
conceived.  To  have  been  written  about  in  the  Bible  —  even  if 
you  were  Ahab  or  Jezebel  —  was  to  be  too  sacred  for  stage 
presentation.  This  attitude  marked  the  nadir  of  belief.  When 
people  believed  in  the  Bible,  they  were  only  too  anxious  to  see 
its  figures  in  flesh  and  blood.  Moses  is  the  hero  of  the  first 
Biblical  play  on   record,  Jesus   of  the   second.     This   modern 

249 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

reverence  was,  and  is,  a  mixture  of  ignorance  and  scepticism. 
When  our  mock  reverence  fades,  or  our  real  reverence  returns, 
the  Biblical  figures  will  return  again  to  the  realm  of  the  poet 
and  the  dramatist.  They  have  never  been  outside  the  painter's. 
The  production  of  "  Joseph  and  His  Brethren,"  undistinguished 
though  it  was,  provided,  let  us  hope,  an  augury  of  better  things. 

Whether  the  Apocrypha  were  ever  under  the  same  embargo 
as  the  Bible  proper  I  do  not  know.  But  the  fact  that  the 
"  Judith  "  theme  had,  till  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  took  it  up, 
appeared  in  England  only  by  way  of  oratorio  and  cantata  — 
the  cantata  was  by  Parry  and  the  best  of  the  three  oratorios 
was  by  Arne  in  1764  —  suggests  that  a  similar  aroma  of 
sanctity  attached  to  it.  Very  little  either  of  the  beauty  of 
holiness  or  the  holiness  of  beaut}'  remained  after  Mr.  Arnold 
Bennett's  treatment.  For  though  he  has  followed  the  text  of 
the  ancient  historical  novel  in  many  a  detail  and  added  a  very 
clever  study  of  a  chief  eunuch,  he  has,  unfortunately,  aban- 
doned the  very  ground-plan  which  makes  the  artistic  value  of 
the  fable.  For  the  Semitic  story-teller  pictures  a  beautiful 
woman,  immersed  in  the  gloom  of  widowhood  and  the  ritual  of 
piety,  becoming  suddenly  inflamed  at  the  call  of  patriotism  into 
bewitching  and  murdering  the  tyrant  Holofernes,  and  then 
subsiding  meekly,  after  her  desperate  adventure,  into  her  aus- 
tere and  saintly  widowhood.  That  is  a  magnificent  artistic 
conception,  and  for  an  author  of  Mr.  Bennett's  rank  to  have 
missed  it,  and  to  have  even  vulgarised  it  by  a  happy  ending  — 
Judith  picking  up  a  handsome  husband  in  the  course  of  her 
adventure  —  would  be  almost  incredible,  were  not  the  English 
stage  in  question  —  and  its  leading  ladies. 

This  is  the  more  regrettable  inasmuch  as  the  true  inwardness 
of  Judith  has  never  been  presented  in  art,  outside  the  some- 
what unread  original,  the  old  Masters  painting  her  only  at  that 
picturesque  moment  when  she  strides  gallantly,  bearing  the  head 
of  Holofernes.  And  that  head  reminds  one  of  Oscar  Wilde's 
overrated  "  Salome,"  prohibited  in  1893  by  the  British  licenser, 
and  produced  the  year  after  in  its  original  French  by  Sarah 
Bernhardt.  This  prohibition  of  an  indecent  work  on  the 
ground  that  it  was  a  Biblical  subject  is  not  unamusing  and 
resembles  the  suggestion  that  the  Prussians  would  have  been 
allowed  to  devastate  Belgium,  had  it  not  been  for  a  certain 
scrap  of  paper.  The  sexual  element  that  Oscar  Wilde  imported 
into  the  story  owes,  however,  nothing  to  the  Bible.  It  is  a 
purely    degenerate    invention.      There    is    as    little    ground    in 

250 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Matthew  or  Mark  for  the  notion  that  Salome  was  in  love  with 
John  the  Baptist,  whose  head  she  coveted  on  the  charger,  as 
there  is  for  Renan's  statement  in  his  "  Vie  de  Jesus  "  that  she 
was  dissolute.  Yet  in  the  copious  controversies  produced  both 
by  the  play  and  the  inevitable  opera,  it  was  taken  for  granted 
that  Wilde's  sexually  perverted  conception  is  rooted  in  the  text. 
To  that  extent  is  even  the  New  Testament  unknown  to  the 
critics.  Outside  the  Gospels  there  is  no  warrant  for  attribut- 
ing any  share  in  the  Baptist's  death  either  to  Salome  or  her 
mother.  Josephus,  a  contemporary  of  John,  knows  nothing  of 
the  vengeance  of  Herod's  wife  upon  the  prophet  who  denounced 
her  for  marrying  her  undeceased  husband's  brother;  he  is 
ignorant  even  of  Salome's  dancing.  He  ascribes  the  execution 
of  John  to  the  prudent  fear  of  Herod  Antipas  lest  the  prophet 
become  too  powerful  with  the  Jewish  masses  and  lead  them  to 
rebellion.  And  he  tells  us  that  so  revered  of  the  Jews  was  John 
that  a  subsequent  defeat  of  Herod's  army  was  regarded  as  a 
divine  chastisement  for  the  murder. 


The  refusal  of  commensality  which  marks  the  orthodox  Jew 
and  which,  as  we  have  seen,  is  conspicuous  by  its  absence  from 
the  stage  Jew,  is  not  so  invariable  a  trait  in  modern  as  in 
mediaeval  Jewry,  and  therefore  our  more,  recent  dramatists  are 
more  forgivable  for  forgetting  it.  It  does  not  figure  even  in 
"  Potash  and  Perlmutter."  Yet  the  mere  race-Jew,  void  even 
of  Zionist  feeling,  who  is  now  the  staple  stage  type,  is  so  late 
and  contemporary  a  creation  of  the  Time-Spirit,  so  transitional 
a  product,  that  he  is  almost  too  topical  for  art,  certainly  for 
any  art  but  comedy,  or  for  any  comedy  but  that  of  transient 
"  humours,"  for  which  posterity  will  need  the  illumination  of 
footnotes.  Yet  this  sort  of  Jew  is  all  we  see  in  Bernstein's 
grandiosely-entitled  "  Israel,"  a  play  which  reveals  only  a 
boulevardier's  ignorance  of  all  the  deeper  currents  of  Jewish 
life.  Heijermans,  the  Dutch- Jewish  dramatist,  comes  a  little 
closer  to  them  in  "  The  Ghetto,"  but  his  Ghetto  is  revealed  only 
on  the  side  on  which  it  repels  the  younger  generation;  it  is 
seen  through  hate,  not  love,  which  according  to  Goethe  is  the 
only  true  vision ;  though,  as  I  have  said,  love  yields  tamer  results 
than  hate,  save  in  the  hands  of  a  master. 

A  German  dramatist,  Carl  Rossler,  has  given  us  a  more  sym- 
pathetic treatment  of  the  high  Frankfort  Jewry  in  his  mediocre 

251 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

comedy  of  the  Rothschild  brothers,  "  The  Five  Frankforters." 
But  it  is  not  true  to  its  period.  First,  because  the  five 
brothers  —  whose  financial  network  is  represented  as  linking 
Paris  and  Vienna,  Frankfort  and  London  and  Naples  —  were 
not  all  thus  simultaneously  established;  secondly,  because  the 
Rothschilds  of  that  time  were  too  pious  to  be  arranging  a 
match  between  a  daughter  of  the  house  and  a  German  High- 
ness, as  the  thesis  of  the  play  pretends.  There  is,  however, 
some  appreciation  of  the  solidarity  of  Jewish  family  life  and  the 
domestic  virtues  of  the  old-fashioned  Jewish  mother,  even  when 
begilded.  The  setting  of  the  play  in  the  old  Frankfort  home  in 
the  quaint  archaic  Judengasse,  that  was  still  at  the  opening  of 
the  nineteenth  century  a  compulsory  quarter,  is  a  picturesque 
promise  which  is  not  sustained.  For  no  breath  of  the  outer 
life  of  the  Jew-street  penetrates  into  these  spacious  salons,  shut 
off  as  by  golden  blinds  from  the  comedies  and  tragedies  of  this 
oldest  and  latest-enduring  of  German  Ghettos.  But  the  exclu- 
sion is  more  probably  due  to  the  dramatist's  ignorance  than  to 
any  real  absence  of  Jewish  colour  in  the  early  environment  of 
this  kind-hearted  family.  And  the  Frankfort  Ghetto  was  up 
to  1830  so  hedged  with  picturesque  anachronisms  —  only  a 
dozen  of  its  couples  could  marry  in  a  twelvemonth,  for  example, 
and  only  four  doctors  could  minister  to  its  six  thousand 
swarming  souls  —  that  the  artist's  ignorance  of  the  milieu  he 
would  paint  is  particularly  regrettable. 

With  the  latest  Austrian  fantasia  on  the  Hebrew  theme,  Es 
Gelit  Writer,  I  have  dealt  already.  It  is  only  another  reading 
of  "  The  Wandering  Jew,"  a  theme  which  curiously  broke  out 
in  three  London  theatres  in  1873,  though  it  had  never  appeared 
in  London  before,  and  is  appearing  there  again  only  this  year. 
The  "  Stage  Encyclopedia  "  catalogues  some  thirty-three  titles 
in  which  the  syllable  "  Jew  "  figures. 

In  Sheridan  the  Jew  was  still  the  moneylender.  Shaw,  with 
more  verisimilitude,  makes  him  a  doctor  —  for,  as  I  have 
pointed  out  on  an  earlier  page,  medicine  was  from  mediaeval 
times  one  of  the  great  callings  of  the  race,  even  Emperors  who 
suspected  the  Jews  of  poisoning  the  wells  never  feeling  safe 
without  a  Jewish  physician.  (In  our  own  day,  too,  it  would  be 
difficult  to  find  a  monarch  without  one.)  In  Jerome  the  Jew 
is  a  bookmaker.  Pinero  gives  us  in  Maldonado  the  amorous 
artistic  type,  descended  like  himself  from  the  Spanish-Jewish 
hidalgos.  *  In  his  "  '  Mind  the  Paint '  Girl,"  we  get  the  genial 
"  bounder  "  with  a  pathetic  passion  for  the  green  room ;  and 

252 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Clyde  Fitch  gave  us  a  still  more  degenerate  type  in  "  The 
Woman  in  the  Case."  No,  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  stage- 
Jew  has  yet  shaken  off  his  past. 

Mr.  Augustus  Thomas  seems,  indeed,  to  have  done  for 
American  Jewry  what  Lessing  did  for  German  Jewry,  and 
Richard  Cumberland  for  English  Jewry,  by  presenting  a  perfect 
type  of  colourless  Christian  manhood  as  a  Jew,  and  it  seems  to 
have  been  eagerly  welcomed,  especially  by  those  Jews  who  are 
not  a  bit  like  it.  But  I  have  not  seen  this  play,  so  must  not 
sink  into  a  dramatic  critic.  Nor  have  I  seen  "  The  House 
Next  Door,"  a  highly  popular  inter-marriage  play  in  which,  I 
understand,  my  own  name  is  bandied  about. 

But  considering  the  great  figures  that  Jewry  has  produced 
within  the  ken  of  the  man  in  the  street  (who  even  wears  prim- 
roses in  honour  of  one  of  them),  it  is  curious  that  the  cad  and 
the  moneylender  should  still  practically  monopolise  the  boards. 
The  situation  is  not  saved  by  producing  a  play  about  the  actual 
"  Disraeli,"  who  is  too  individual  a  hero.  But  the  stage  is  no- 
toriously not,  as  Hamlet  conceived  it,  a  mirror  held  up  to  na- 
ture, but  a  magic  mirror  reflecting  types  that  have  long  since 
passed  away.  "  Watch  that  man,"  I  said  once,  pointing  out  the 
late  Dr.  Herzl  to  a  famous  actor-manager ;  "  you  will  one  day 
play  him."  That  time  is  not  now  distant.  The  stage  incarna- 
tion of  Mendel  Beilis  is,  however,  an  instance  of  the  stage  get- 
ting almost  ahead  of  life.  Like  his  fellow-Jew  Dreyfus,  this 
victim  of  the  Blood  Accusation  became  a  legend  while  still  in 
prison,  and  both  in  melodrama  and  cinematography  he  has  been 
exploited  wherever  the  Ghetto  boasts  of  a  theatre.  It  is  pleas- 
ant to  think  that  the  real  Beilis,  though  a  mere  clerk,  retired 
with  dignity  to  Palestine,  where  he  has  just  donated  his  savings 
to  the  National  Fund. 

Save  for  this  allusion  to  the  Beilis  play,  I  have  altogether 
omitted  from  this  cursory  survey  the  vast  field  of  Yiddish  and 
Hebrew  drama,  which  has  not  the  ear  of  the  world,  nor  the 
interest  attaching  to  the  spectacle  of  the  Jew  as  others  see  him. 
Of  this  indigenous  drama  it  may  roughly  be  said  that  it  is  tragic, 
for  the  Ghetto,  unlike  Christendom,  prefers  an  "  unhappy  end- 
ing," and  enjoys  death-scenes  more  than  love-scenes.  It  seems 
to  have  become  so  habituated  to  tears  as  to  draw  an  emotional 
voluptuousness  from  mimic  sorrow. 


253 


LANGUAGE  AND  JEWISH  LIFE 


The  Hebrew  volume  in  honour  of  Sokolow's  jubilee,  to  which 
this  essay  —  in  its  Semitic  rendering  —  is  a  contribution,  af- 
fords, like  the  "  Hebrew  Encyclopedia  "  edited  by  him,  a  strik- 
ing disproof  of  the  general  idea  that  Hebrew  is  an  extinct  lan- 
guage.    While  popular  ignorance  deems  the  Old  Testament  the 
end  as  well  as  the  beginning  of  Hebrew  literature,  or  has  at  most 
some  vague  idea  of  the  Talmud,  the  scribes  have  never  ceased 
writing  for  a  moment.     None  keener  than  they  to  welcome  the 
invention  of  Gutenberg.      Myriads  of  volumes,  pouring  forth 
pauselessly  through  the  ages,  attest  the  genius  and  the  pedan- 
try, the  spirituality  and  sterility  of  the  race.     The  philosophy 
of  Maimonides,  the  poems  of  Solomon  Gabirol  and  Jehuda  Hal- 
evi,  the  mysticism  of  the  Zohar  —  these  would  challenge  atten- 
tion in  any  literature,  and  they  are  the  most  notable  fruits  of 
the  long  period  when  the  distinction  of  sacred  and  secular  was 
scarcely  made  in  Hebrew  literature,  when  every  book  that  fell  to 
the  floor  was  piously  kissed  as  it  was  picked  up.      The  eight- 
eenth century  shows  Luzzatto  in  Italy  producing  poetic  and 
allegorical  drama  in  Occidental  form,  and  Wessely  in  Germany 
writing  the  Epic  of  Exodus   after  the  fashion   of  Klopstock. 
And  when  with  the  close  of  that  century  of  storm  the  light  of 
the  outside  world  began  to  stream  more  fully  into  the  Ghetto, 
th6  sacred  tongue  took  on  still  stranger  functions.      In  Ger- 
many   Rappaport    creates    the    scientific    study    of    Judaism. 
Krochmal,  a  native  of  Brody  —  child  of  a  swarming  Ghetto, 
where  the  casual  pilgrim  sees  only  degeneration  and  dirt  —  re- 
interprets the  old  religion  by  the  principles  of  Hegel ;  a  Polish 
poet,  Isaac  Erter,   satirises  its   superstitions  with  the  vigour 
of  a  Pope  or  a  Swift.      Even  more  remarkable  is  the  nineteenth 
century  movement  that  curiously  owed  its  impulse  to  a  Hebrew 
translation  of  Eugene  Sue's  "  Mysteries  of  Paris."     Abraham 
Mapu  founded  the  modern  Hebrew  novel,  both  in  its  romantic 
and  realistic  forms,  and  had  a  host  of  followers  in  both  fields. 
Gordon,  the  Hebrew  Byron,  arose  in  Russia  to  express  in  nerv- 
ous modern  Hebrew  all  the  tragedy  —  the  external  persecution, 

254 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

the  internal  narrowness  —  of  the  Jewish  lot.  The  novels  of 
Smolensky  showed  Jewry  its  own  visage  and,  warring  equally 
against  mediaeval  pietism  and  modern  indifference,  taught  the 
need  of  re-nationalisation.  And  in  these  newest  applications  of 
the  old  tongue  it  is  no  longer  the  organ  of  faith,  but  the  instru- 
ment of  revolt  and  reconstruction.  A  host  of  translators 
added  the  ferment  of  European  thought  to  the  internal  disin- 
tegration of  the  Ghetto,  and  imported  free-thinking  and  Social- 
ism. Political  journalism  sprang  up  to  bring  the  outer  world 
still  nearer.  Grub  Street  arose  in  the  Ghetto,  and  Bohemia 
was  taken  into  the  Pale.  If  the  belief  that  Hebrew  literature 
ended  with  the  Old  Testament  is  a  vulgar  error,  no  less  an  error 
were  it  to  imagine  that  it  is  still  a  Holy  Literature  in  the 
sense  in  which  holiness  is  synonymous  with  piety  and  ecclesias- 
ticism. 

So  marvellous  a  survival  of  an  ancient  language,  and  so  un- 
equalled a  flow  of  literature  from  Genesis  to  the  last  number  of 
the  Boar  Hayom,  the  Daily  Mail  of  Jerusalem,  produced  by  a 
race  that  lost  its  Fatherland  eighteen  centuries  ago,  tempts  one 
to  consider  the  inter-relations  between  Israel's  language  and 
Israel's  life. 

II 

Language  is  the  chief  index  of  life.  As  no  man  is  dead  so 
long  as  the  mirror  put  to  his  lips  reveals  a  breath,  so  no  race 
is  extinct  so  long  as  there  comes  from  its  lips  the  breath  of 
speech.  A  people  that  speaks  is  not  dead ;  a  people  that  is  not 
dead  speaks. 

"Lend  me  a  looking  glass: 
If  that  her  breath  shall  mist  or  stain  the  stone, 
Why,  then  she  lives." 

But  by  speech  we  must  understand  a  distinctive  speech,  not 
a  speech  spoken  by  all  the  world.  A  peculiar  people  without  a 
peculiar  speech  would  be  a  contradiction.  The  literature  of 
Israel  in  its  widest  sense  comprises  the  contributions  made  by 
Jews  to  the  thesaurus  of  the  world.  All  alphabets  and  all  vo- 
cabularies are  drawn  into  its  service.  Were  it  figured  after  the 
fashion  of  that  quaint  mediaeval  tree  in  the  monastery  of  San 
Marco,  whereof  each  leaf  is  the  story  of  a  saintly  brother,  it 
would  appear  an  Yggdrasil  overshadowing  the  globe,  with  each 
leaf  typifying  another  language.  There  would  be,  for  example, 
a  Greek  branch  for  the  Gospels,  and  a  Latin  branch  for  the 

255 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

treatises  of  Spinoza;  an  Arabic  branch  for  the  metaphysics  of 
Maimonides  ;  a  German  branch  for  the  lyrics  of  Heine ;  a  French 
branch  for  the  dramas  of  D'Ennery ;  an  Italian  branch  for  the 
economic  treatises  of  Luzzatti;  a  Danish  branch  for  the  criti- 
cisms of  Brandes ;  an  English  branch  for  the  romances  of  Dis- 
raeli ;  a  Dutch  branch  for  the  dramas  of  Heijernians,  and  so  on, 
and  so  on.  But  these  works  are  all  obviously  hybrid  products, 
children  of  mixed  marriages.  Tempting  as  would  be  a  critical 
discrimination  of  the  parental  factors,  this  section  of  Jewish 
literature  must  be  excluded  from  the  present  survey.  In  180-A 
Elie  Halphen  Halevy  of  Paris  published  a  Hebrew  Ode  to 
Peace  in  honour  of  Napoleon,  saviour  of  France.  His  grand- 
son Ludovic  delighted  the  Boulevards  with  French  farcical  com- 
edies ;  his  great-grandson,  again  named  Elie,  publishes  works  on 
sociology.  However  interesting  and  suggestive  this  literary 
heredity,  only  the  first  Halevy,  the  Hebrew  poet,  used  a  tongue 
specifically  Jewish,  and  affords  to  that  extent  proof  of  inde- 
pendent Jewish  life.  Speech,  then,  as  a  proof  of  a  people's  life, 
must  be  "  peculiar  "  speech. 

But  there  is  another  modification  necessary.  By  speech  as 
a  proof  of  life  is  meant  living  speech ;  that  is  to  say,  fluid  speech 
■ —  speech  that  changes  with  the  changes  of  life.  The  Latin  of 
the  Church  and  of  the  scholars  of  the  Middle  Ages  was  not, 
perhaps,  quite  a  dead  language,  but  it  was  only  a  half-living 
language.  It  was  confined  to  the  learned ;  its  vocabulary  could 
undergo  no  natural  increase,  no  natural  loss.  To  be  wholly 
living,  language  must  be  rooted  in  the  people,  must  be  watered 
by  the  tears  of  the  common  pain  and  feel  the  sunshine  of  the 
common  joy.  It  must  be  a  barometer  of  history,  exquisitely 
sensitive,  registering  and  recording  every  breath  of  change. 
The  Hebrew  in  which  Hebrew  literature  since  the  destruction  of 
the  Second  Temple  has  been  written,  can  for  these  reasons  not 
be  said  to  be  entirely  living.  Hebrew  had,  indeed,  ceased  to  be 
fully  alive  long  before  —  soon  after  the  return  from  the  Baby- 
lonian exile  —  and  by  the  time  of  Jesus  Aramaic  had  practi- 
cally replaced  it  as  a  living  tongue  (with  Greek  as  a  lingua 
franca).  The  Scriptures  needed  a  Targum  (translation). 
The  Talmud  shows  the  bilingual  conflict  even  in  literature,  and 
Aramaic  has  its  place  in  the  prayer-book,  too.  In  time  Ara- 
maic likewise  died  from  the  lips  of  men  —  Arabic  and  other 
languages  took  its  place  as  a  Jewish  vernacular.  And  when 
Aramaic  was  dead  it  became  holy  too,  almost  as  holy  as  He- 
brew, and  Cabbalistic  literature  could  be  written  in  both,  as  in 

256 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

the  Zohar.  Hence  we  have  the  paradox  that  if  Sokolow  or 
Achad  Ha-am  can  write  to-day  more  or  less  in  the  language  of 
Isaiah  and  the  Psalmists  it  is  because  of  the  destruction  of 
Jewish  nationality,  which  left  literature  the  only  possession  of 
the  Jew.  Had  Palestine  prospered  like  England,  Hebrew  would 
have  been  as  archaic  as  Anglo-Saxon  is  for  Englishmen.  The 
Greeks  who  have  remained  continuously  on  the  soil  of  Hellas 
speak  an  idiom  very  far  removed  from  that  of  JEschylus  and 
Thucydides,  and  this  by  sheer  natural  evolution,  without  the 
interference  of  another  invasive  tongue.  In  Palestine,  in  whose 
Jewish  Colonies  Hebrew  has  at  last  become  a  living  tongue,  a 
few  centuries  will  remove  it  as  far  from  the  Hebrew  of  the  Bible, 
unless  Biblical  Hebrew  is  made  the  standard  and  a  dictionary 
like  that  of  the  French  Academy  compiled  from  it.  But  even  so 
it  would  have  to  admit  hundreds  of  new  words,  with  which  we 
could  not  dispense.  The  vocabulary  of  Neo-Hebrew  already, 
of  course,  contains  words  and  ideas  of  which  the  writers  of  the 
Bible  did  not  dream.  Of  Neo-Hebrew  —  despite  the  diction- 
ary devoted  to  it  by  Ben  Jehuda,  of  Jerusalem  —  it  is  difficult 
to  say  whether  it  has  been  the  more  alive  or  the  more  dead. 
It  was  more  alive  than  the  Hebrew  or  Latin  of  the  scholars, 
it  was  dead  beside  the  gossip  of  the  market-place.  All  these 
new  words  have  come  to  it  as  importations,  not  as  natural 
growths;  not  to  mention  that  the  audacities  of  journalists,  in 
adapting  and  transforming,  substitute  imposition  from  above 
for  creation  from  below.  Since  —  however  great  the  number 
of  people  able  to  read  it  or  even  speak  it  —  it  was  nowhere  the 
sole  natural  medium  of  communication  of  a  large  community,  it 
was  not  really  rooted  in  life.  It  merely  allowed  what  grew  in 
the  outside  world  to  be  grafted  upon  it.  Hebrew,  then,  in  spite 
of  the  synagogue  liturgy  and  a  vast  literature,  has  never  lived 
in  the  full  sense  between  the  earlier  days  of  the  Second  Temple 
and  the  beginning  of  this  century. 

When  the  liturgical  poets  of  the  Middle  Ages  introduced  their 
ingenious  rhymed  acrostics,  their  vexed  and  tortured  word-spin- 
nings into  the  prayer-book,  two-thirds  of  the  worshippers  were 
prevented  by  ignorance  from  understanding  or  criticising  them. 
They  could  only  devoutly  pray  them  or  sing  them.  And  in 
contemplating  the  later  non-devotional  developments  of  Hebrew 
literature,  the  same  semi-paralysis  of  the  tongue  must  be  borne 
in  mind.  Brilliant  as  was  the  ingenuity  expended  in  producing 
modern  literature  in  terms  of  the  Old  Testament  and  the  Tal- 
mud, it  remains,  when  all  is  said,  the  artificial  sport  of  scholars 

257 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

and  geniuses  imitating  the  literary  forms  of  their  European 
environment,  rather  than  writing  from  and  to  the  heart  of 
Israel.  The  fact  that  their  books  are  in  Hebrew  must  not  blind 
us  to  the  true  nature  of  the  contents.  The  work  of  this  transi- 
tional period,  particularly  of  writers  like  Alcharisi  or  Imman- 
uel,  who  were  exclusively  secular,  is  no  less  hybrid  than  that  of 
Heine  or  Disraeli.  Immanuel,  for  example,  imitated  his  friend, 
Dante,  besides  importing  the  sonnet-form,  while  Alcharisi  was 
inspired  by  the  Arabic  Mrikama  (dramatic  narrative)  and  even 
blended  Arabic  with  his  Hebrew.  The  modern  masters  of  He- 
brew literature,  who  found  their  inspiration  in  their  own  race, 
have  been  for  the  most  part  despairing  spirits,  who  saw  them- 
selves as  the  last  minstrels  of  a  dying  language,  understanded 
neither  of  the  cultured  nor  of  the  people.  Dr.  Nahum 
Slouschz,  in  his  fascinating  and  instructive  book,  "  La  Renais- 
sance de  la  Litterature  Hebrai'que,"  tells  us  that  the  death  of 
Smolensky  left  Gordon  hopeless  and  drew  from  him  a  cry  of 
despair,  which  may  be  regarded  as  his  own  last  word. 

"What,  in  sum,  is  all  our  people  and  its  literature? 
A  felled  giant,  lying  face  to  earth. 

The  whole  world  is  Israel's  sepulchre!     And  his  books? 
The  epitaph  of  his  funeral  monument." 


Ill 

What,  then,  is  the  language  in  which  the  real  life  of  Israel  in 
exile  has  been  expressed?  The  answer  is,  the  language  of  the 
particular  country  in  which  each  section  resided,  modified  by 
such  words  and  locutions  as  expressed  the  difference  between 
Jews  and  the  rest  of  their  fellow-citizens.  These  differences 
were  mainly  religious,  and  therefore  the  vast  majority  of  these 
additional  words  and  phrases  were  borrowed  from  the  Hebrew ; 
the  rest  had  reference  to  peculiar  social  customs.  Added  to 
Spanish,  this  specifically  Jewish  language  produced  Ladino. 
Added  to  German  (of  an  earlier  epoch  and  a  less  grammatical 
character  than  the  classical),  it.  produced  the  jargon  known  as 
Yiddish.  That  both  of  these  were  frequently  written  in  He- 
brew characters  is  due  to  the  mere  accident  that  many  Jews 
knew  no  other  alphabet.  The  Ashkenazic  communities  devel- 
oped from  within,  instead  of  subjecting  themselves,  like  the  Se- 
phardim,  to  the  common  European  culture.  Hence  it  is  to  Yid- 
dish that  we  must  look  for  the  truest  repository  of  specifically 

258 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Jewish  sociology.  Although  the  wealth  of  emotional  and  sym- 
pathetic terms  in  Ladino  serves  to  tell  the  tale  of  Jewish  tender- 
ness in  a  crueller  Spanish  environment,  Yiddish,  far  more  than 
Hebrew  or  Neo-Hebrew,  answers  to  our  definition  of  a  living 
language,  The  principal,  if  not  the  only,  medium  of  communi- 
cation among  the  Jewish  masses,  it  vibrates  with  their  history, 
follows  the  mould  of  their  life  and  thought,  and  colours  itself 
with  their  moods.  Moreover  it  has  that  truest  mark  of  life  — 
the  power  of  absorbing  and  transforming  elements  from  with- 
out. It  sucks  in  foreign  words  and  turns  them  to  its  own 
moulds  as  freely  as  French  turns  them  to  its  own  pronunciation. 

The  enormous  literary  and  journalistic  activity  of  Yiddish 
exceeds  even  that  of  Hebrew.  It  has  its  shoals  of  newspapers, 
its  schools  of  poets,  dramatists,  and  novelists,  and  even  its  liter- 
ary historiographer  in  Professor  Leo  Wiener  of  Harvard  Uni- 
versity. Do  we  seek  to  learn  of  the  Ghetto  from  within,  Morris 
Rosenfeld  will  sing  to  us  of  its  poverty  and  its  pain.  Gold- 
faden,  Gordin,  David  Pinski,  and  a  dozen  others  will  bring  its 
humours  over  the  footlights ;  Peretz,  Asch,  Shalom  Aleichem 
and  a  score  of  minor  geniuses  will  incarnate  them  for  our  inner 
eye.  But  we  scarcely  need  their  pictures  of  a  highly  differ- 
entiated existence  to  convince  us  of  the  peculiar  flavour  of  Jew- 
ish life.     Yiddish  is  its  own  proof. 

From  Yiddish  we  can  build  up  a  picture  of  the  life  of  the 
Judengasse.  Subtracting  from  a  Yiddish  dictionary  all  Teu- 
tonic elements,  we  have  a  residuum  which  summarises  the  spe- 
cific spiritual  life  of  the  Jews  of  the  Exile,  and  shows  us  the 
ideas  for  the  sake  of  which  they  accepted,  or  rather  courted, 
isolation  from  the  European  masses.  Theirs  was  a  life  of  rich 
differences  from  the  environment,  and  if  no  other  evidence  of 
this  difference  remained,  the  Yiddish  vocabulary,  phrases,  locu- 
tions, proverbs,  bywords,  are  sufficient  proof  of  it. 

These  deposits  from  generations  of  narrow  but  vivid  life 
form  a  rich  mine  of  entertainment  and  instruction,  and  have 
not  failed  to  call  into  existence  folklore  societies  for  their 
specific  study.  The  psychology  bred  by  the  Ghetto,  the  micro- 
scopic piety  and  casuistic  ceremonial,  the  mixture  of  asceticism 
and  shrewd  common  sense,  the  pervasive  fun  and  humour,  the 
eager  commercialism  that  yet  sustains  and  reveres  a  class  of 
student-drones,  the  unique  family  love,  the  cynicism  and  the 
tenderness  —  all  have  found  expression  and  perpetuation  in 
these  racy  locutions.  Types  evolved  nowhere  else  rise  living 
from  the  glossary  —  the  Shadclian,  who  is  and  is  not  a  matri- 

259 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

monial  agent ;  the  Badchcm,  who  is  and  is  not  a  marriage- jester  ; 
the  Shammos,  who  is  and  is  not  a  beadle;  the  Schnorrer,  who  is 
and  is  not  a  beggar  —  because  these  humble  or  sordid  occupa- 
tions are  all  transcended  in  the  larger  brotherhood  of  Israel, 
which  makes  every  Jew  the  equal  of  his  superiors  without  rob- 
bing him  of  his  natural  superiority  to  his  inferiors. 

There  is  a  story  of  a  Jewish  witness  unable  to  explain  to  a 
magistrate  what  a  Shofar  was.  At  last,  to  the  suggestion  that 
it  was  a  trumpet,  he  cried  in  glad  relief,  "  Yes,  it  is  a  trumpet." 
"  Then  why  didn't  you  say  so?  "  "  Because  it  is  not  a  trum- 
pet." These  shades  of  significance  which  it  is  impossible  to 
render  in  another  tongue  are  the  truest  proof  of  specific  exist- 
ence. The  Shofar  is  a  ram's  horn,  but  who  thinks  of  it  as  any- 
thing but  the  solemn  instrument  pealing  repentance  to  the 
white-shrouded  figures  of  Atonement  Day  ?  A  Shofar  is  —  a 
Shofar.  If  a  Shofar  were  indeed  a  trumpet,  no  call  to  national 
life  could  ever  be  blown  upon  it. 

IV 

Language,  then,  is  the  proof  of  life.  There  can  be  no  dif- 
ference of  life  without  difference  of  language.  The  truth  of 
this  may  be  iDustrated  from  less  specious  examples  than  na- 
tions. Every  stratum  of  society  has  its  own  catchwords,  un- 
known to  the  others  and  acting  as  shibboleths ;  every  university, 
every  school,  every  profession  has  its  lingo ;  nay,  every  family 
has  a  store  of  special  phrases  due  to  the  comedies  of  its  own 
experiences,  not  understanded  of  the  next-door  neighbour. 
Every  game  creates  its  own  slang;  cricket,  football,  horse-rac- 
ing, golf,  each  has  its  own  vocabulary,  which  the  votaries  em- 
ploy among  themselves.  Wherever,  then,  there  is  difference  of 
life,  there  is  difference  of  language. 

Let  us  apply  this  test  of  life  to  the  so-called  emancipated 
Jewries,  to  the  Jewries  of  the  post-Ghetto  period.  I  will  take 
England  and  America,  which  I  know  best.  Among  the  richer 
and  more  educated  Jews  of  London,  all  words  of  a  specifically 
Jewish  character  have  been  gradually  dropped.  Even  the  word 
Shule,  one  of  the  last  to  go,  has  been  replaced  by  synagogue. 
The  desuetude  of  words  like  "  milchig  "  applied  to  food  or  cul- 
inary apparatus,  words  which  have  no  English  equivalent  —  one 
cannot,  for  example,  say  a  "  milky  knife  " —  reveals  the  decay 
of  the  pious  practices  with  which  they  were  associated. 

In  the  contemptuous  repudiation  of  the  jargon  as  vulgar, 
even  Hebrew  words  have  been  ignorantly  banned.     Just  as  the 

260 


THE  VOICE  OP  JEKUSALEM 

rabbi  assimilates  in  dress  to  the  Christian  clergyman,  so  all  re- 
ligious terms  are  translated  into  an  English  which  does  not  ex- 
actly express  them,  and  in  accordance  with  which  they  tend  to 
modify  themselves.  When  for  the  Hebrew  "  Son  of  the  Com- 
mandment," to  express  the  youth  who  at  the  age  of  thirteen  is 
counted  an  adult  with  religious  responsibilities,  the  phraseology 
of  Confirmation  is  introduced,  the  Christian  concepts  tend  sub- 
tly to  gather  round  the  Jewish  ceremonial.  It  is  not,  perhaps, 
so  much  that  a  change  of  vocabulary  produces  a  change  of  con- 
ception ;  more  probably  the  conception  is  already  in  process  of 
transformation  under  the  influence  of  the  alien  environment, 
ere  the  foreign  word  is  introduced,  and  its  adoption  only  defi- 
nitely clarifies  the  change  already  vaguely  going  on,  even  if  it 
precipitates  its  rate  of  movement.  When  the  Hebrew  saluta- 
tion "  Peace  be  to  you  "  is  abandoned  for  "  How  do  you  do?  " 
or  "  How's  business?  "  we  are  afforded  the  indication  that  Jew- 
ish consciousness  and  ideals  have  been  silently  under  transfor- 
mation, and  that  the  ideas  of  the  milieu  are  winning  their  way. 
Hence  it  is  that  pietists  fight  so  frenziedly  over  apparent  ex- 
ternals. Details  of  ritual  and  speech  are  not  trifles,  as  the 
superficial  imagine  who  call  them  superficial.  It  is  true  they  lie 
on  the  surface,  but  the  fanatics  are  sub-consciously  alive  to  the 
fact  that  they  have  their  roots  deep  in  the  inner  life.  The  ob- 
jection to  women  smoking  was  not  to  women  drawing  in  and 
puffing  out  mere  smoke :  it  was  to  the  inner  emancipation  of  their 
psychology,  of  which  the  cigarette  was  only  the  symbol. 

The  Zionist  movement,  though  rather  more  barren  than  might 
have  been  expected  as  regards  vocabulary,  has  not  entirely 
failed  in  its  brief  span  of  life  to  add  its  quota  of  evidence  to  the 
thesis,  "  No  language,  no  life."  "  Shekel  "  and  "  shekel-payer  " 
are  not  new  words,  but  they  have  been  transformed  to  an  en- 
tirely new  connotation  in  their  application  to  contributions,  and 
to  voters  for  delegates  at  the  Congress.  "  The  Congress  "  it- 
self is  different  from  any  other  Congress.  "  The  Basle  pro- 
gramme "  is  a  phrase  which  has  been  added  to  every  civilised 
language  of  the  Old  and  New  Worlds,  and  when  only  a  few 
years  old  it  had  already  taken  on  a  somewhat  undesirable  sanc- 
tity, as  indicating  a  fixed  policy  from  which  it  were  heretical 
to  deviate.  But  more  characteristic  evidence  of  life,  and  the 
one  entirely  new  word  evolved  by  Zionism,  was  Neinsager  (no- 
sayer),  a  word  fashioned  in  the  crucible  of  history,  in  that  crit- 
ical hour  when  —  man  after  man  —  the  last  Congress  of 
HerzFs  life  was  voting  "  Ay  "  or  "  No  "  on  the  question  whether 

261 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

a  Commission  should  be  appointed  to  investigate  the  British 
offer  of  a  territory  in  East  Africa.  The  Zionist  movement  has 
thus  supplied  the  only  counteractive  to  the  disappearance  from 
modern  Jewish  life  of  all  verbal  indexes  of  vitality. 

In  American  Jewry  the  tendency  to  exclude  all  traces  of 
Jewish  nomenclature  has  been  pushed  to  its  last  limits.  The 
disappearance  of  the  words  Kasher  and  Trepha  is  an  exact  indi- 
cation of  the  disappearance  of  the  conceptions  themselves,  with 
the  obedience  to  these  dietary  prescriptions.  The  Synagogue 
has  now  become  the  "  Temple,"  a  term  which  is  not  even  abso- 
lutely distinctive,  since  Christian  Science  has  also  its  Temples. 
I  speak,  of  course,  not  of  the  Ghettos  of  New  York  and  Chicago 
—  for  they  are  merely  Russia  and  Galicia  migrated  to  America. 
I  speak  of  the  real  American  Jewish  life  into  which  the  Ghetto 
is  sooner  or  later  melted  up.  In  this  life  the  "  Temple  "  is  not 
even  an  object  of  frequent  pilgrimage;  for  it  has  been  largely 
supplanted  by  the  Jewish  "  Club  " —  a  word  even  less  Jewish. 
It  may  be  contended  that  American  words  like  "  Sunday 
School  "  are  annexed  by  Jews  and  saturated  with  a  peculiar 
Jewish  significance,  but  even  such  words  are  very  rare,  and 
limited  to  the  inevitable  religious  minimum,  many  conceptions 
that  have  no  English  equivalent  disappearing  altogether:  for 
example,  Mitzvoh,  Shochet,  Shnodar,  HardaJah,  Mvnyan,  Seder, 
&c.  As  for  social  and  semi-religious  words  like  Kehillah,  Par- 
nass,  Gabbai,  Gett,  Yomtovdik —  a  clean  sweep  has  been  made 
of  them. 

Subtract  from  the  American-Jewish  dictionary  all  American 
terms,  and  what  remains?  Practically  nothing.  Roughly 
speaking,  no  specific  Jewish  language  now  exists  in  America, 
ergo  no  specific  Jewish  life.  Very  nearly  the  same  statement  is 
true  of  London.  Unless,  then,  our  test  is  false,  we  reach  the 
undeniable  conclusion  that  Jewish  life  disappears  outside  the 
Ghetto.  It  may  have  an  apparent  existence  through  Jews  in- 
termarrying, and  may  thus  linger  on  like  an  actor  loth  to  leave 
the  stage,  but  practically  it  is  extinct. 

A  life  these  Jews  have,  indeed,  not  necessarily  inferior  to  the 
Jewish  life.  But  a  Jewish  life  it  is  not.  It  is  the  general  life 
of  the  nation  whose  language  they  spak.  Scrupulously  buried 
in  the  same  cemetery,  they  have  a  common  death.  But  a  com- 
mon life  —  no,  that  they  have  not.  Upon  the  clear  mirror  of 
language  they  produce  no  breath. 

If  Israel  is  to  live  and  speak  again,  it  can  only  be  on  a  soil 
of  his  own. 

262 


THE  TERRITORIAL  SOLUTION  OF  THE  JEWISH 

PROBLEM 

{Fortnightly  Review,  April  and  May,  1919.) 


Human  life  does  not  proceed  by  logic,  nevertheless  logic  is 
occasionally  useful.  At  such  a  crisis  in  the  fate  of  Israel  as 
the  great  war  has  brought,  a  clear  view  of  the  prospect  is 
peculiarly  necessary. 

But  clear  thinking  upon  the  Jewish  question  is  as  uncommon 
as  upon  any  other  human  question.  Even  genius,  rare  as  it  is, 
is  not  quite  so  rare,  for  among  all  races  great  men  appear,  who 
impart  dynamic  impulses  to  their  age.  They,  however,  add 
fresh  elements  to  its  intellectual  confusion,  and  not  till  time  has 
tried  their  ideas  can  the  value  of  their  contributions  be  disen- 
tangled from  the  welter. 

Such  men  of  genius  were  the  first  apostles  of  Territorialism, 
Pinsker  and  Herzl.  They  saw  vividly  the  evils  of  the  Jewish 
situation  and  recorded  their  diagnosis  in  imperishable  words. 
The  Diaspora,  they  perceived,  held  two  perils  for  the  Jews  — 
the  external  menace  of  anti-Semitism  and  the  internal  menace  of 
de-Judaisation :  the  former  ranging  from  massacre  and  eco- 
nomic boycott  to  mere  social  prejudice,  and  not  to  be  diminished 
even  by  patriotic  blood-sacrifices,  rather  indeed  likely  to  aug- 
ment under  the  national  self-concentration  of  war ;  the  latter 
ranging  from  secularisation  or  Christianisation  to  the  mere  neg- 
ative inability  to  use  a  common  language  or  develop  a  common 
culture,  and  producing  in  the  more  emancipated  countries  — 
even  when  the  physical  atoms  of  Jewry  still  cohered  —  a  "  liv- 
ing corpse,"  a  body  without  its  soul. 

That  these  evils  were  aspects  of  the  same  phenomenon  —  the 
landlessness  of  Israel,  his  ubiquitous  existence  and  persistence 
as  a  minority  —  was  equally  clear  to  the  pioneers  of  Territor- 
ialism. A  Jewish  State,  they  pointed  out,  not  with  cold  detach- 
ment, but  with  passionate  resentment  —  whether  of  the  Russian 
pogroms,  or  of  the  Dreyfus  persecution  —  would  be  free  from 
both  these  menaces.  Within  its  boundaries  at  least  there 
would   be   neither   anti-Semitism  nor   insidious   de-Judaisation. 

263 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

And  under  the  spell  of  their  verbal  enchantments  and  con- 
tagious emotion  arose  the  vision  of  this  new  land  of  Israel,  like 
the  sight  of  domes  and  cupolas  to  the  thirsting  traveller  in 
the  desert. 

So  far  their  logic  was  as  impeccable  as  their  observation  was 
accurate.  It  was  only  when  they  put  forth  this  new  Jewish 
State  as  a  remedy  for  the  evils  actually  existing  here  and  now, 
a  remedy  that  would  work  forthwith ;  it  was  only  when  they  pic- 
tured the  Jewish  State  as  supplanting  the  Diaspora,  and  the 
Diaspora  as  transporting  and  transforming  itself  almost  over- 
night into  the  Jewish  State,  that  their  grip  on  reality  relaxed 
and  their  logic  broke  down. 

It  was  natural  enough  that,  having  realised  that  the  evils  of 
the  Diaspora  were  inherent  in  it  and  could  only  vanish  with  its 
destruction,  Herzl  should  sally  out  like  a  knight-errant  to  de- 
stroy it.  It  was  natural  enough  for  his  followers  to  believe 
that  they  were  out  to  destroy  it.  Nevertheless,  the  realistic  vo- 
cabulary of  Herzl  —  his  parade  of  charters,  companies,  and 
banks  —  served  but  to  disguise  the  fundamental  unreality  of 
his  solution,  and  the  glaring  fallacy  which  he  shared  with  Pins- 
ker.  For  the  Diaspora  is  indestructible,  except  by  centuries  of 
absorption  into  the  various  national  melting  pots,  and  the  heat 
of  the  solution  can  be  provided  only  by  "  Christian  love,"  which 
is  rarer  than  radium. 

In  abandoning  before  the  legions  of  Rome  the  struggle  for 
independent  political  existence  in  favour  of  spiritual  isolation 
and  economic  symbiosis,  the  Jewish  race  discovered  the  secret 
of  immortality,  if  also  of  perpetual  motion.  In  the  Diaspora 
anti-Semitism  will  always  be  the  shadow  of  Semitism.  The  law 
of  dislike  for  the  unlike  will  always  prevail.  And  whereas  the 
unlike  is  normally  situated  at  a  safe  distance,  the  Jews  bring 
the  unlike  into  the  heart  of  every  milieu,  and  must  thus  defend 
a  frontier-line  as  large  as  the  world.  The  fortunes  of  war 
vary  in  every  country,  but  there  are  perpetual  tension  and  fric- 
tion even  at  the  most  peaceful  points,  which  tend  to  throw  back 
the  race  on  itself.  The  drastic  method  of  love  —  which,  I  re- 
peat, is  the  only  human  dissolvent  —  has  never  been  tried  upon 
the  Jew  as  a  whole,  while  Russia  carefully  conserved  —  even 
by  a  ring-fence  —  the  breed  she  designed  to  destroy.  But 
whether  persecution  extirpates  or  brotherhood  melts,  hate  or 
love  can  never  be  simultaneous  throughout  the  Diaspora,  and  so 
there  will  probably  always  be  a  nucleus  from  which  to  restock 
this  eternal  type. 

264 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Even  when  the  Jewish  State  was  in  full  swing,  a  great  Dias- 
pora existed,  and  if  we  Jews  had  only  read  our  own  literature 
we  should  have  suspected  that  something  so  long-standing  could 
not  easily  be  swept  away.  "  There  is  a  certain  people,"  said 
Haman  unto  King  Ahasuerus,  "  scattered  abroad  and  dispersed 
among  the  peoples  in  all  the  provinces  of  thy  kingdom;  and 
their  laws  are  diverse  from  those  of  every  people ;  neither  keep 
they  the  King's  laws ;  therefore  it  profiteth  not  the  King  to  suf- 
fer them.  If  it  please  the  King,  let  it  be  written  that  they  be 
destroyed." 

But  if  all  Israel's  enemies  have  not  succeeded  in  destroying 
the  Diaspora,  it  may  well  defy  even  his  own  efforts.1 

i  It  will  help  the  reader  to  keep  his  grip  on  reality  if  he  studies  the  latest 
statistics  of  the  Diaspora,  as  given  on  the  basis  of  an  American  inquiry  by 
the  Allgemeine  Zeitung  des  Judentvms,  of  Berlin,  in  its  issue  of  June  25th, 
1920.  "Poland,  3,300,000;  the  Ukraine,  3,300,000;  United  States,  3,100,000; 
Russia  and  Siberia,  900,000;  Roumania,  650,000;  Germany,  540,000;  Hun- 
gary, 450,000;  Great  Britain  and  Ireland,  300,000;  Austria,  300,000;  Lithu- 
ania, 250,000;  Jugoslavia,  200,000;  South  and  Central  Africa,  170,000; 
France,  150,000;  Arabia,  130,000;  Greece,  120,000;  Holland,  110,000;  Mo- 
rocco, 110,000;  the  Argentine,  100,000;  Canada,  100,000;  Turkey,  100,000; 
Palestine,  100,000;  Australia,  20,000;  other  European  countries,  200,000; 
India,  Persia,  and  Afghanistan,  100,000;  other  American  countries,  includ- 
ing the  Dutch,  Danish,  and  British  West  Indies,  30,000.  Total,  15,430,000." 
The  number  for  Palestine  is  too  high  by  several  myriads,  but,  as  this  list 
seems  to  omit  the  65,213  Jews  of  Tunis,  and  the  65,000  of  Algeria  given  in 
the  Jetoish  Year  Book  of  London,  1919,  the  total  does  not  err  on  the  plus 
side.  And  doubtless  other  Jews  lurk  everywhere.  Mr.  Arnold  J.  Marks, 
F.R.G.S.  writes  in  a  lecture:  "It  is  more  than  thirty  years  since  my 
journeys  beyond  the  seas  commenced.  It  mattered  not  how  far  away  from 
the  railways  my  wanderings  in  the  bush,  or  the  high  and  low  veldt,  took  me, 
yet  among  every  few  white  men  I  met  in  the  wilderness  was  a  Jew.  They 
say  the  Scotchman  is  everywhere.  So  he  is  in  foreign  countries  or  the  Col- 
onies, but  it  is  in  the  bank,  or  stores,  in  towns  with  safe  and  comfortable 
housing,  that  the  cannie  but  pleasing  Scot  can  be  found.  Up  country  the 
Jew  beats  the  Scotchman  easily  as  a  world  wanderer.  During  my  numerous 
journeys  to  South  Africa,  and  after  leaving  the  shoals  of  our  co-religionists 
settled  in  Johannesburg,  Barberton,  Bulawayo  and  Salisbury,  I  have  spent 
weeks  and  months  beyond  the  zones  where  neither  trains  ran  nor  horses 
could  live,  and  have  met  the  lonely,  cheerful,  industrious,  thrifty  Jew. 
Again,  I  have  had  similar  experiences  in  the  Australian  bush.  At  Aden  I 
found  an  ancient  Jewish  colony  of  traders  —  reliable  and  respected.  Even 
in  such  an  out-of-the-way  place  as  Italian  Somaliland,  on  the  east  coast 
of  Africa,  at  a  port  named  Mogadishaw,  there  was  the  Jew,  and  but  for 
tenacious  industry  and  good  repute  he  would  not  have  been  tolerated  in 
such  a  place."  An  illuminating  illustration  of  the  sub-ubiquity  of  the  Jew 
is  provided  by  the  statistics  of  the  Jews  of  India,  as  given  by  the  census  of 
1911,  published  in  the  Bene-Israel  Annual  for  this  year.  They  range  over 
every  part  of  the  Peninsula,  British  or  native.  There  are,  for  example, 
636  at  Janjira  in  the  Konkan  group,  260  in  the  Deccan  group,  and  the  list 
concludes  with  3,747  at  Aden.  There  are  other  remnants  of  lost  Jewish 
tribes  hidden  away  in  Asia  and  Africa;  there  is  a  warrior  race  of  Jewish 
Highlanders  in  the  Caucasus,  besides  many  survivals  of  the  Chazars,  the 
great  Turkish  people  converted  to  Judaism  in  the  seventh  or  eighth  century 

265 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


II 

A  story  relates  that  Pobiedonostseff,  when  asked  what  would 
become  of  the  Jews  of  Russia,  replied :  "  One-third  will  emi- 
grate, one-third  will  be  baptised,  and  one-third  will  starve." 
Brutal  as  was  the  utterance,  it  was  nearer  to  actuality  than 
early  Territorialism.  If  the  question  were  now  asked,  What 
will  become  of  the  Jews  of  the  Diaspora?  the  answer — after 
twenty  years  of  work  upon  the  Jewish  problem  —  would  have  to 
be :  "  Ten  per  cent,  will  emigrate  to  the  Jewish  State  —  if  one 
is  ever  formed  —  20  per  cent,  will  be  baptised  or  otherwise  lost 
to  Jewry,  and  70  per  cent,  will  remain  in  the  Diaspora,  wan- 
dering about."  There  is,  in  fact,  no  human  means  by  which 
fourteen  or  fifteen  million  Jews,  scattered  through  all  coun- 
tries, can  be  agglomerated  in  a  single  territory  under  autono- 
mous conditions.  Yet  the  propaganda  of  Pinsker  and  Herzl 
implied  that  this  miracle  was  possible.  They  were  themselves 
eager  to  live  in  the  State  that  was  to  replace  the  Diaspora,  they 
believed  that  the  bulk  of  Jewry  could  be  convinced  by  their 
reasoning  and  fired  by  their  ardour,  and  —  most  naively  of  all 
—  they  believed  that  territories  capable  of  receiving  the  new 
exodus  existed  at  choice.  And  in  the  fervid  Oriental  imagina- 
tion of  their  followers,  outrunning  even  theirs,  the  Ghettos  of 
the  world  were  transported  across  space  to  the  chosen  land  as 
by  some  magic  carpet  of  the  Arabian  Nights.  To  the  Russian 
masses,  who  hung  up  the  images  of  Herzl  and  Nordau  in  their 
cottages  and  signed  petitions  or  greetings  by  the  hundred  thou- 
sand, the  deliverers  of  Israel  had  appeared  and  the  end  of  the 
Galut  (the  exile)  was  at  hand.  Nor  were  the  educated  classes 
less  credulous.  Emigration,  immigration,  colonisation,  agri- 
culture, economics,  history,  folk-psychology,  all  were  left  un- 
studied, and  the  Jews  never  showed  themselves  so  completely 
Luftmenschen  as  when  they  resolved  to  be  at  last  terrestrial  and 
territorial. 

And  the  opponents  of  Territorialism  were  as  naive  as  its 
champions.  Instead  of  demonstrating  that  the  re-gathering  of 
Israel  was  impracticable,  they  vociferated  that  it  was  undesir- 
able.     Instead  of  admitting  that  it  was  too  good  to  hope  for, 

in  South  Russia.  The  Crimea,  part  of  their  kingdom,  was  known  till  the 
thirteenth  century  as  Chazaria  or  Gazaria.  Recent  converts  to  Judaism 
also  abound  among  the  peasantry  in  Russia,  and  are  so  pious  that  many  who 
applied  to  the  emigration  bureaus  of  my  organisation  refused  to  go  to  any 
other  land  than  Palestine. 

266 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

they  denounced  it  as  reactionary  and  dangerous.  In  a  panic 
as  fantastic  as  the  mirages  of  the  converted,  they  saw  the  Jew- 
ish State  springing  up  like  Jonah's  gourd,  and  themselves 
forcibly  deported  to  it.  And  to-day,  still  untaught  by  experi- 
ence, they  have  raised  the  same  hue  and  cry  over  the  proposed 
Palestine  settlement  under  British  auspices,  as  though  any  Jew- 
ish State  capable  of  accommodating  the  Diaspora  could  pos- 
sibly arise  under  the  conditions  imposed,  or  within  the  territory 
prescribed. 

Ill 

The  unhappy  fact  is  that  Territorialism,  while  it  can  point 
out  to  the  Diaspora  that  what  is  the  matter  with  it  is  precisely 
that  it  is  a  Diaspora,  can  do  little  or  nothing  to  mend  or  end  it. 
The  fathers  of  Territorialism  drew  a  picture  of  the  Jewish  State, 
and  putting  it  beside  a  photograph  of  the  Diaspora  cried,  like 
Hamlet :  "  Look  here  upon  this  picture  and  on  this."  And  as- 
suredly the  counterfeit  presentments  of  Hamlet's  father  and  of 
his  uncle  exhibited  no  greater  contrast  —  the  one  "  wholesome," 
the  other  "  like  a  mildew'd  ear."  But  as  little  as  Hamlet's 
wretched  uncle  could  be  transformed  into  his  splendid  sire,  so  lit- 
tle can  the  Diaspora  be  transmuted  into  the  Jewish  State.  It  is 
in  a  sense  almost  a  mockery  of  the  Jewish  misery  to  hold  up  be- 
fore it  such  a  picture  of  success  and  happiness.  The  Jewish 
State  is  something  in  the  future  —  something  to  be  generated  in 
the  womb  of  time:  the  Diaspora  is  actually  here.  The  rise  of 
the  State  would  indeed  affect  the  Diaspora,  but  it  is  as  much 
calculated  to  fortify  and  prolong  its  existence  as  to  curtail  it. 
True,  there  are  Jews  who  urge  that  with  the  future  of  Jewry 
assured  in  a  Jewish  State,  with  an  ark  and  pairs  provided 
against  the  Deluge,  the  Diaspora  could  afford  to  disappear. 
Like  a  parent  who  had  ensured  his  posterity's  fortunes,  it 
would  cry  "  Nunc  dimittis"  But  would  it?  Would  not  the 
effect  be  the  contrary?  Has  not  the  very  effort  to  create  the 
State  re-animated  the  Diaspora?  Would  not  the  young  crea- 
tion radiate  back  some  of  its  vitality  to  the  parent? 

Were  the  Jewish  State  founded  on  a  great  scale,  and  did  it 
become  so  prosperous  as  to  draw  to  itself  all  that  was  vital  in 
Jewry,  there  might  be  some  hope  of  the  Diaspora's  decay.  But 
the  chances  of  so  heroic  a  solution  dwindle  daily,  and  the  eu- 
thanasia of  the  Diaspora  could  be  sought  more  hopefully  from 
complete  indifference  to  Jewish  affairs  than  from  the  vivifying 

267 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

activity  of  State-building.  The  fundamental  fallacy  of  Pins- 
ker  and  Herzl  lay,  however,  not  in  the  notion  that  the  rise  of 
the  State  would  indirectly  bring  about  the  subsidence  of  the 
Diaspora,  but  in  the  assumption  that  the  Diaspora  could  be 
directly  deported  to  the  State. 

They  were  perhaps  misled  by  the  success  of  Moses  in  leading 
the  Jews  out  of  Egypt.  But,  apart  from  the  factor  of  Moses 
having  Israel's  God  behind  him  and  a  pillar  of  fire  before,  his 
task  was  comparatively  simple.  He  had  his  people  compactly 
concentrated  —  he  had  not  to  collect  them  from  the  four  cor- 
ners of  the  earth,  divided  and  diversified  by  its  languages,  cus- 
toms, and  politics,  and  not  even  united  by  that  community  of 
unbearable  suffering  which  is  the  only  goad  to  revolutionary 
change  known  to  history.  What  Moses  had  to  end  was  not  a 
Diaspora,  but  a  slavery.  Territorialism,  in  short,  should  never 
have  been  put  forward  as  a  cure  for  the  Diaspora,  but  as  a  call 
to  new  creation.  It  is  not  the  administering  of  a  nostrum  to 
a  diseased  and  decrepit  ancient,  but  the  begetting  of  a  fresh 
young  life.  It  summons  us  to  cease  wringing  our  hands  over 
the  irreparable  or  wailing  over  ruined  walls,  but  out  of  our  yet 
unexhausted  seed  to  create  a  new  Jewish  stock  in  a  self-gov- 
erning Jewish   territor}\ 

IV 

Leaving  the  problem  or  malady  of  the  Galut  as  humanly  in- 
curable or  insoluble,  a  sane  Territorialism  aspires  only  to  cre- 
ate a  new  Judasa.  It  cannot  supplant  the  Diaspora,  it  can  only 
supplement  it.  But  the  new  Judaea  would  be  quick  with  the 
fires  of  youth;  to  its  radiant  vitality  even  the  final  dropping 
asleep  of  the  poor,  weary  old  Diaspora  could  bring  no  menace; 
into  the  unknown  world  of  the  future  it  would  carry  forward 
that  same  warm  humanity  and  sane  idealism  with  which  ancient 
Judaea  enriched  antiquity.  In  this  one  focus  of  Jewish  life  the 
abnormal  conditions  prevalent  everywhere  else  would  be  re- 
placed by  the  normal.  In  this  one  milieu  the  Jewish  child  would 
be  born  as  naturally  Jewish  as  the  Bristol  child  is  born  Eng- 
lish, the  Bordeaux  child  French,  or  the  Canton  child  Chinese. 
But  —  let  us  repeat  —  there  is  no  alchemy  by  which  the  Dias- 
pora itself  can  be  transmuted  into  a  self-governing  Israel,  and 
we  shall  make  no  progress  with  the  Jewish  problem  till  we  real- 
ise that  Territorialism  is  as  likely  to  prop  up  the  Diaspora  as 
to  undermine  it,  and  that  the  self-governing  territory,  though 

268 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

its  pioneer  elements  and  a  continuous  stream  of  subsequent  im- 
migration will  come  from  the  Diaspora,  cannot  possibly  receive 
the  populations  of  the  Ghettos,  Jewries,  and  Judengassen,  nay, 
that  its  first  legislation  must  actually  be  to  exclude  an  indis- 
criminate rush,  and  that  its  stoutest  foundations  will  be  laid 
in  the  sons  born  of  its  own  soil.  Thus  the  Diaspora  would  still 
be  left  to  wrestle  with  its  own  problems.  Whatever  help  the 
Jewish  State  could  bring  it,  would  be  indirect,  slow,  and  uncer- 
tain ;  even  the  fear  that  the  State  would  bring  harm  rather 
than  help,  though  it  is  an  unmanly  fear,  is  not  altogether 
groundless  in  so  illogical  a  world.  But,  however  the  State  and 
the  Diaspora  might  act  and  react  upon  each  .other,  they  would 
grow  more  and  more  unlike  each  other.  As  the  Canadian- 
Englishman  differs  from  the  slum-born  Briton,  so  would  the 
Judaean  Jew  tend  to  differ  from  the  Ghetto-Jew.  The  genius 
soli  of  the  Jewish  State  could  not  be  exported  like  Palestine 
earth  or  bottles  of  Jordan  water,  nor  would  its  solution  of  Jew- 
ish questions  suffice  for  more  than  local  consumption.  Being 
able  to  keep  its  day  of  rest  on  the  Saturday,  it  would  have,  for 
example,  no  Sabbath  problem.  But  how  would  this  help  the 
unhappy  artisan  of  America,  impaled  on  the  dilemma  of  Sab- 
bath desecration  or  starvation? 


These  considerations  do  not  cease  to  apply  if  the  Palestine 
form  of  Territorialism  is  adopted.  The  choice  of  old  Judaea 
as  the  terrain  of  the  new  Judaea  could  not  alter  the  brute  facts. 
But  we  must  carefully  distinguish  between  Zionism  —  which  is 
all  things  to  all  men  —  and  Territorialism,  which  is  a  concept 
definite  and  unchanging.  The  object  of  Zionism  was,  for  ex- 
ample, defined  by  Mr.  Sokolow  at  the  last  Zionist  Congress  as 
to  bring  Zion  to  the  Diaspora ;  a  complete  reversal  of  the 
original  concept.  But  Territorialism  is  not  even  the  Basle  pro- 
gramme with  the  abstract  form,  Itoland,  substituted  for  the 
concrete  Palestine,  nor  if  it  accepted  Palestine  as  the  sphere  of 
its  operations  would  the  breach  be  wholly  healed.  For  the  rift 
that  suddenly  opened  out  between  the  two  parties  at  the  so- 
called  Uganda  Conference  was  not  a  brand-new  chasm  made  by 
the  earthquake  of  the  British  offer;  it  was  the  exposure  of  an 
abyss  which  had  yawned  between  them  from  the  first  and  which 
had  been  concealed  only  by  the  common  territorial  objective. 
Zionism  takes  its  vision  and  ideal  from  the  past ;  Territorialism 

269 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

places  them  in  the  future.  The  one  looks  back,  the  other  for- 
ward. Zionism  is  not  safe  even  from  the  restoration  of  animal 
sacrifices.  Territorialism  moves  along  the  lines  of  "  creative 
evolution."  The  past  is  our  cradle,  not  our  prison,  and  there 
is  danger  as  well  as  appeal  in  its  glamour.  The  past  is  for 
inspiration,  not  imitation,  for  continuation,  not  repetition. 
Probably  no  nation  in  the  world  now  lives  in  its  original  habitat, 
and  had  other  peoples  looked  backward  as  obstinately  and  slug- 
gishly as  our  own,  few  of  the  original  masters  of  the  world  would 
still  be  in  possession  of  territories.  As  in  every  period  great 
masses  of  Jews  have  been  able  to  settle  and  maintain  themselves 
in  almost  every  country  on  earth,  so  with  a  little  more  foresight, 
had  they  not  been  paralysed  by  a  tradition  of  passive  expecta- 
tion, they  would  long  ago  have  built  up  at  least  one  self-govern- 
ing centre,  whether  in  Palestine  or  elsewhere.  Even  as  it  is, 
they  have  come  nigh  to  an  autonomous  life  in  certain  periods 
and  regions.  The  very  Pale  of  Russia  produced  a  sort  of  sub- 
national  life.  A  single  city  like  Salonica,  where  the  Jewish 
Sabbath  came  to  prevail  of  itself,  might  have  been  made  the  nu- 
cleus of  a  commonwealth  like  Venice,  had  not  all  such  ideas  been 
inhibited  by  the  superstition  of  a  Heaven-ordained  Exile,  to  be 
replaced  in  God's  good  time  by  a  replica  of  ancient  Judaea,  com- 
plete from  the  Temple  with  its  shambles  to  the  last  pomegran- 
ate tassel  on  the  lower  hem  of  the  High  Priest's  robe;  a  vision 
which  has  no  more  substantiality  than  the  popular  poetic  dream 
of  restoring  the  primitive  Golden  Age,  and  which  could  at  best 
have  the  value  of  a  theatrical  reproduction  or  a  museum  ex- 
hibit. 

In  the  admirable  little  anthology  which  the  Chief  Rabbi  of 
England  has  prepared  for  Jewish  sailors  and  soldiers,  there  is 
cited  Longfellow's  sympathetic  poem  on  "  The  Jewish  Cemetery 
at  Newport,"  expounding  how  the  "  Ishmaels  and  Hagars  of 
mankind  "  who  lie  buried  there,  had  lived  by  the  great  tradi- 
tions of  their  people's  past  and  seen  them  all  reflected  in  the 
coming  time.  They  spelt  the  world  backward  —  says  the  poet 
—  like  a  Hebrew  book : 

"  Till  life  became  a  Legend  of  the  Dead." 

The  Chief  Rabbi  prudently  cuts  the  poem  short  here.     He  does 
not  give  "  the  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter  " : 

"  But  ah !  what  once  has  been  shall  be  no  more. 
The  groaning  earth  in  travail  and  in  pain 
270 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Brings  forth  its  races,  but  does  not  restore, 
And  the  dead  nations  never  rise  again." 

If  Longfellow  erred  in  supposing  the  Jewish  nation  irretriev- 
ably dead,  he  was  profoundly  right  in  teaching  that  Time  never 
retraces  its  steps.  Even  if  Judaea  is  re-established  in  Palestine, 
it  can  never  be  the  old  Judasa  over  again,  any  more  than  He- 
brew, if  it  becomes  again  the  national  language,  can  be  re- 
stricted to  the  Biblical  vocabulary.  Aeroplanes  must  now  fly 
through  Hebrew  literature  as  well  as  archangels. 

There  is  no  lack  of  Zionists  who  perfectly  understand  this 
and  whose  outlook  is  as  modern  as  the  most  progressive  Terri- 
torialist  could  desire,  but  have  they  pondered  sufficiently  the 
profound  warning  of  Jesus  that  you  cannot  put  new  wine  into 
old  bottles  ?  Will  they  not,  in  fact,  be  exploited  by  Jewish  cler- 
icalism, by  that  ossified  orthodoxy  which  would  bind  Israel  for- 
ever to  traditional  theology  and  legendary  legislation,  and 
which  the  vicinity  of  Sinai  will  appear  to  vindicate  afresh? 

In  a  story  by  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  a  man  hatches  out  the  egg  of 
an  iEpyornis,  the  largest  of  extinct  birds.  For  centuries  the 
egg  has  lain  hidden  and  preserved  in  the  mud  of  Madagascar, 
but  he  brings  the  latent  bird  to  life  and  feeds  it  and  brings  it 
up.  At  first  all  is  charm  and  idyll,  but  in  a  few  years  the  crea- 
ture, grown  colossal  and  terrible,  kicks  and  pummels  its  foster- 
father  as  with  the  foot  of  a  cart-horse  and  a  beak  like  a  sledge- 
hammer. It  is  the  fate  that  awaits  all  who  play  with  the  past 
and  revive  the  intellectually  extinct. 

It  is  a  thousand  pities  that  the  intellectual  issues  involved  in 
the  fate  of  the  Jewish  race  were  not  thought  out  and  fought  out 
before  any  attempt  was  made  to  unify  Israel  by  a  cut-and-dried 
scheme.  A  Pan-Jewish  Congress  should  have  preceded  the 
Zionist  Congress.  Principles  and  beliefs  are  the  realities  be- 
hind the  banding  together  of  men  for  specific  purposes,  and  a 
race-bond  is  no  sufficient  nexus  when  there  are  such  grave  dif- 
ferences of  outlook  and  such  spiritual  issues  interfused.  As 
British  party  politics  were  suspended  in  war,  so  Jewish  differ- 
ences were  laid  aside  by  the  Zionists  for  the  common  task  of 
rebuilding  Zion.  But  Zion  is  not  a  mere  place ;  to  rebuild  it  is 
not  like  rebuilding  Belgium  or  Serbia,  and  the  evasion  of  all 
root  questions  in  the  interests  of  a  sham  unity  will  one  day 
have  to  be  paid  for,  and  with  heavy  interest.  Herzl  had  a 
glimpse  of  this  truth  when  he  declared  that  the  return  to  Juda- 
ism must  precede  the  return  to  Zion,  but  he  did  not  follow  up 

271 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

his  somewhat  belated  discovery.  His  original  attempt  to  treat 
the  Jew  as  definable  by  physiology  was  a  grave  historic  error. 
Not  even  Ezra,  who  reduced  the  conception  of  Israel  to  its  low- 
est race-terms,  treated  the  Jew  as  a  mere  ethnic  type,  for  his 
purgation  of  the  race  was  professedly  in  the  interests  of  its 
religion. 

VI 

But  if  some  extremists  for  race  and  soil  have  sought  to  dis- 
pense with  a  religious  bond,  others  would  have  it  overshadow 
everything  else,  and  Territorialism,  besides  being  impeded  by 
Zionism,  with  its  cry  of  "Only  in  Palestine,"  has  also  to  meet 
the  onset  of  anti-Zionism  with  its  cry  of  "  Only  a  religion." 

The  more  rabid  anti-Zionists  go  so  far  as  to  forget  or  ignore 
that  even  if  Judaism  has  now  become  synonymous  with  a  mere 
religion,  it  at  least  began  as  the  religion  of  a  peculiar  people. 
They  speak  as  if  it  were  like  one  of  the  other  religions,  which 
sprang  into  life  with  a  universal  appeal  and  message  to  every 
race  and  colour.  Judaism  did,  indeed,  at  a  secondary  stage  of 
its  existence,  enter  upon  a  period  of  propagandism,  but  un- 
fortunately, for  various  historical  reasons,  its  career  as  a 
world-religion  was  checked,  and  what  might  have  been  a  great 
river  became  a  back-water  again.  It  is  true  that  proselytes 
have  never  ceased  to  be  admitted  more  or  less  grudgingly,  but 
even  when  they  were  sought  and  welcomed,  they  were  absorbed 
not  into  a  universal  doctrine,  but  into  a  national  system,  sat- 
urated with  historic  traditions  and  celebrations.  So  that,  even 
admitting  that  Judaism,  not  the  Jewish  race,  has  been  the  es- 
sential thought  of  Israel,  we  do  not  escape  the  conception  of  a 
national  organism.  And  since  this  organism  can  lead  only  a 
cramped,  crippled,  mutilated,  and  disjointed  life  in  the  Dias- 
pora, the  fact  that  it  is  but  the  incorporation  of  a  religion  does 
not  obviate  the  need  of  a  geographical  basis  for  it.  Those  who 
plead  that  it  is  "  only  a  religion,"  like  Christianity  or  Islam, 
must  first  make  it  so.  They  must  denude  it  of  its  national  ves- 
ture, strip  it  of  its  peculiar  chronology  and  historical  celebra- 
tions, and  preach  it  tirbi  et  orbi;  only  thus  will  vanish  even  the 
religious  necessity  for  Territorialism. 

VII 

With  this  contention  that  Judaism  is  "  only  a  religion  "  is 
connected  the  idea  of  a  world-mission,  and  that  this  "  Mission 

272 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

of  Israel  "  is  better  served  by  dispersion  than  by  concentra- 
tion. While  the  majority  of  the  arguments  against  Territor- 
ialism  spring  from  anaemia  or  ignoble  fear,  and  are  beneath  con- 
tempt and  below  discussion,  tins  setting  up  of  a  rival  construc- 
tive policy  instead  of  the  eternal  negative,  this  ideal  of  Israel 
as  "  the  servant  of  mankind  "  proclaimed  in  the  noble  prophe- 
cies of  Isaiah,  cannot  but  evoke  a  glow  of  sympathy  from  every 
true  Jew. 

But  if  the  ideal  of  the  Jewish  mission,  rooted  though  it  is  in 
Jewish  thought  and  tradition,  really  demands  the  dispersion  of 
Israel,  we  should  be  driven  to  the  paradox  that  if  there  were  no 
Diaspora  it  would  be  necessary  to  create  one,  and  that  if  we 
were  still  in  Palestine  it  would  be  our  duty  to  scatter  from  it. 
Missions  do  undoubtedly  suggest  migrations.  Missionaries  do 
usually  go  out  in  search  of  the  unregenerate.  Did  not  Jesus 
describe  the  Pharisees  as  compassing  sea  and  land  to  make  a 
single  proselyte?  How,  then,  can  we  deny  that  it  is  an  ad- 
vantage for  Israel  to  be  everywhere  on  the  spot?  For  assur- 
edly he  is  everywhere  surrounded  by  races  of  inferior  theology, 
not  to  say  inferior  civilisation;  races  that,  despite  a  veneer  of 
apparent  superiority  to  him,  have  never  yet  achieved  his  spir- 
itual values,  nor  the  idea  of  peace  to  all  mankind  expressed  in 
his  everyday  greeting. 

Moreover,  did  Israel  utilise  his  ubiquity  to  preach  his  ideal 
of  human  brotherhood  and  to  stand  out  staunchly  for  his  mis- 
sion, thus  linking  up  the  nations,  the  evils  due  to  the  absence  of 
a  territory  would  cease  to  count.  The  glow  of  apostolic  faith 
and  ardour  would  preserve  the  Jewish  spirit  in  more  than  its 
pristine  vitality,  while  anti-Semitism  would  be  welcomed  as  at 
once  the  price  of  prophesying  and  the  tribute  which  the  lower 
pays  to  the  higher.  The  nation  of  martyrs  and  pioneers  would 
then  wear  persecution  as  a  crown  and  welcome  death  as  a  priv- 
ilege. The  Diaspora  would  either  be  wiped  out  —  a  glorious 
ending  —  or  it  would  survive  in  prophetic  splendour.  And 
should  the  Great  War  —  despite  a  material  League  of  Nations 
—  result  in  no  spiritual  improvement  in  the  present  barbarous 
system  of  international  relationship,  this  role  would  clearly 
await  us. 

Unfortunately  I  have  not  detected  in  any  of  the  preachers  of 
the  Jewish  Mission  the  faintest  attempt  to  convert  their  con- 
cept into  a  working  reality.  By  a  mission  they  seem  to  mean  a 
passive  expectation  of  a  providential  millennium.  There  may 
be  occasions  when  "  they  also  serve  who  only  stand  and  wait  " ; 

273 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

but  that  this  is  the  sole  variety  of  service  open  to  a  great  his- 
toric people,  and  that  it  will  suffice  for  the  next  two  thousand 
rears  a  it  sufficed  for  the  last,  is  a  superstition  more  contempt- 
ible than  the  lowest  gospel  of  race-Zionism. 

As  Territorialism  is  Realpolitik  —  a  real  activity  for  a  real 
political  and  spiritual  situation  — -  it  can  take  no  account  of  so- 
lutions so  purely  academic.  Otherwise  it  would  gladly  retire  in 
favour  of  the  loftier  and  the  grander  ideal  of  a  world-mission. 
It  solaces  itself,  however,  with  the  reflection  that  even  from  a 
Territorial  centre  it  would  not  be  impossible  to  pursue  the  Jew- 
ish Mission.  For  some  missions  are  achieved  by  staying  at 
home.  The  Athenians  abode  in  Athens  and  filled  the  world  with 
thought  and  beauty.  And  so,  too,  the  establishment  of  a  model 
State,  a  commonwealth  of  social  justice  and  spiritual  dignity 
—  if  the  Jews  could  but  achieve  it  —  would  radiate  inspiring 
impulses  to  all  humanity. 

It  may  perhaps  be  urged  by  the  passive  proclaimers  of  the 
mission  that  the  production  of  model  Jewish  communities  every- 
where, without  any  direct  preachment  to  the  heathen,  would  be 
still  more  educative.  There  would  be  no  answer  to  this  argu- 
ment did  the  Jewish  communities  represent,  like  the  Quaker 
communities,  a  distinctive  point  of  view.  This,  however,  is 
precisely  what  is  wanting,  and  the  Jews,  instead  of  standing  for 
their  own  ideals,  are  the  most  fervid  assimilators  of  the  con- 
ventions of  the  majority  and  the  moment.  Their  aim,  con- 
scious or  unconscious,  is  not  apostleship,  but  survival. 

VIII 

Piercing  through  all  the  confusion,  prejudice,  and  cowardice 
of  modern  Jewry,  the  formula  struck  out  by  the  Ito  (the  Jew- 
ish Territorial  Organisation)  at  its  foundation  came  like  a 
ray  of  sunlight.  It  was  the  first  clear  and  .statesmanlike  con- 
tribution to  the  political  solution  of  the  Jewish  question,  and 
will  be  increasingly  recognised  as  the  only  possible  programme, 
even  for  Zionism  itself,  once  that  movement  comes  to  grips 
with  reality.  Our  formula,  like  Aaron's  rod,  must  swallow  all 
the  others. 

"  To  acquire  a  territory  upon  an  autonomous  basis  for  those 
Jcie.r  who  cannot  or  will  not  remain  in  the  lands  in  which  they 
lire  at  present."  It  is  not  till  this  formula  Is  analysed  that 
the  complexity  which  underlies  its  seeming  simplicity  can  be 
realised.      There   are   three   separate   strands   of   thought   and 

274 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

purpose.  In  the  first  place  the  substitution  of  the  concrete 
"  Jews  who  cannot  or  will  not  remain  in  the  Diaspora  "  for 
that  disputable  political  concept,  "  the  Jewish  people,"  cuts 
away  sharply  the  greatest  practical  difficulty  in  the  way  of  the 
scheme  —  the  fear,  real  or  imaginary,  that  the  Jews  who  can 
and  will  remain  in  the  Diaspora  will  be  politically  compromised, 
and  their  present  status  endangered.  The  autonomous  basis, 
declared  to  be  a  sine  qua  non,  will  appertain  not  to  Jewry  at 
large,  but  simply  to  those  who  immigrate  into  the  new  terri- 
tory, and  who  have  surely  as  much  right  to  form  a  new  home 
and  a  new  nationality  for  themselves  and  under  their  own  insti- 
tutions as  had  the  Mormons,  the  Pilgrim  Fathers,  the  French 
emigrants  who  founded  Quebec,  or  the  British  sects  who,  within 
living  memory,  built  up  New  Zealand. 

In  the  second  place,  this  limitation  of  the  scheme  to  the 
emigrants  from  the  Diaspora  places  it  on  a  sound  psycholog- 
ical basis.  A  problem  exists  only  for  those  who  feel  it.  Those 
Jews  who  will  and  can  remain  in  the  Diaspora  prove,  ipso  facto, 
that  for  them  the  situation  is  not  intolerable.  And,  thirdly, 
by  building  our  State  out  of  the  best  among  our  emigrants,  we 
help  to  solve  also  the  Jewish  emigration  problem,  the  famous 
Wohin.  Like  that  village  chest  which,  according  to  Oliver 
Goldsmith,  was  contrived 

"  A  double  debt  to  pay, 
A  bed  by  night,  a  chest  of  drawers  by  day." 

this  new  Jewish  State  is  to  be  at  once  a  land  of  self-government 
and  a  land  of  refuge.  And  it  would  find  its  first  material,  not 
in  Jews  solicited  to  emigrate,  but  in  Jews  already  emigrating. 
At  one  stroke  we  provide  a  practical  necessity  and  the  luxury 
of  an  ideal.  That  Jewish  labour-force,  which,  with  the  force  of 
Jewish  brotherhood,  now  goes  unutilised  by  us,  would  be  con- 
centrated on  the  chosen  soil  like  a  priceless  irrigation  current. 
And  whereas  with  the  existing  centres  of  immigration  the  ad- 
vent of  every  additional  Jew  is  an  additional  incentive  to  anti- 
Semitism,  in  Itoland  every  accession  to  the  population,  whether 
from  within  or  without,  would  be  a  strengthening  of  the  Jew 
and  Judaism. 

IX 

It  is  not  to  be  denied  that  the  difficulties  of  such  an  enter- 
prise are  colossal.     But,  at  any  rate,  there  is  no  truth  in  the 

275 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

parrot-cry  that  such  a  State  can  be  founded  "  only  in  Zion  " 
or  that  our  people  will  go  nowhere  else.  Such  an  assertion  is 
not  merely  ideological,  it  is  —  in  face  of  the  spectacle  of  the 
wandering  Jew  wandering  everywhere  —  positively  brazen. 
The  Ito  has  even  tested  the  point  by  opening  out  a  new  immi- 
gration area  via  Galveston.  Within  a  few  years  ten  thousand 
souls  were  more  or  less  happily  settled  in  a  territory  they  had 
never  heard  of.  The  bait  here  was  bread.  Could  we  have 
added  also  the  Jewish  folk-life  and  the  Jewish  Sabbath,  we 
should  have  had  a  rush  like  that  of  Christendom  to  the  gold- 
fields.  » 

Indeed,  as  already  pointed  out,  the  danger  is  we  should  have 
too  many  applicants  rather  than  too  few,  and  these,  even  when 
not  feckless  and  sickly,  suited  but  rarely  for  agricultural  pio- 
neering. The  further  danger  of  being  swamped  by  "  alien  " 
immigrants,  though  not  to  be  overlooked,  is  less  grave.  A  ter- 
ritory, which  had  lain  dormant  so  long  and  would  contain  no 
obvious  opportunities  of  easy  riches,  would  not  suddenly  seem 
inviting  to  the  general  immigrant,  particularly  if  Hebrew  or 
Yiddish  were  the  prevailing  idiom.  Our  popularity  is  not  so 
great  that  people  who  could  have  the  benefit  of  our  room  would 
rush  for  our  company.  Moreover,  the  tragic  thinning  out  of 
man-power  by  the  war  would  co-operate  with  the  great  call  for 
reconstructive  work  in  every  country  to  reduce  the  streams  of 
general  emigration.  And  this  same  cause  might  make  Govern- 
ments with  sparsely-settled  territories  more  anxious  than  be- 
fore for  immigration  and  more  amenable  to  a  Territorial  deal. 
For,  outside  of  negotiation,  there  is  no  means  of  obtaining  a 
Territory.  The  sword  which  Moses  and  Joshua  wielded  can- 
not be  ours.  There  is  no  way  for  a  Diaspora  to  organise  an 
army.  At  most  it  can  contribute  Jewish  regiments  to  some 
belligerent  Power,  and  thus  divide  itself  still  more  hopelessly. 
But  the  negotiation  for  a  Jewish  territory  would  demand  in- 
finite tact  and  patience  and  the  goodwill  of  all  Israel.  For  the 
land  would  have  to  be  one  desirable  for  other  white  races  — 
not  a  derelict  tropical  desert  like  the  Northern  Territory  of 
Australia,  once  suggested  to  the  Ito  by  the  Premier,  Mr.  Dea- 
kin.  And  to  be  commensurate  with  the  need  the  territory  must, 
besides  being  fertile  and  healthy,  be  large  enough  to  sustain  a 
real  Jewish  commonwealth.  A  toy  republic,  like  San  Marino 
or  Andorra,  would  be  no  compensation  for  all  the  sweat  and 
travail  —  still  less  a  territory  that  was  not  even  autonomous. 
The  Jewish  soul  can  find  more  profitable  employment  for  its  en- 

276 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ergies  than  to  build  a  doll's  house  upon  sand.  We  have  already 
seen  that  the  Jewish  Diaspora  cannot  be  destroyed  even  if  the 
Jewish  State  could  be  created,  but  if  the  State  cannot  even  be 
created,  then  it  were  folly  to  persist  in  a  sham. 

In  so  late  an  age  of  history,  when  every  "  place  in  the  sun  " 
has  its  ferocious  claimants,  and  earth-hunger  has  passed  from 
an  appetite  into  a  greed,  the  prospects  of  discovering  and  ac- 
quiring such  a  territory  are  not  rosy.  Nevertheless,  the  Ito 
has  put  forward  more  than  one  proposition  which  held  distinct 
possibilities,  and  had  Zionism  been  reasonable  instead  of  fanat- 
ical, Territorial  instead  of  nebulous,  the  foundations  of  a  Jew- 
ish State  might  already  have  been  laid.  Cyrenaica,  indeed,  to 
which  we  sent  a  scientific  expedition,  disappointed  our  expecta- 
tions ;  and  the  negotiations  for  Angola,  on  which  another  ex- 
pedition reported  more  promisingly  just  before  the  war,  were 
handicapped  by  the  fiscal  narrowness  of  Portuguese  colonial 
policy.  But  the  very  existence  of  these  hitherto  unknown  pos- 
sibilities made  it  probable  that  other  opportunities  had  been 
equally  overlooked. 


A  cartoon  in  a  Jewish  comic  paper,  published  in  New  York, 
once  represented  the  writer  in  his  capacity  of  President  of  the 
Ito  as  a  bachelor  in  quest  of  a  bride.  Four  maidens  stood 
awaiting  his  lordly  choice  —  three  fair  enough,  but  one  sur- 
passingly beautiful.  This  lovely  creature  was  labelled  "  Zion." 
The  others  were  marked  "  Uganda,"  "  Angola,"  "  Cyrenaica." 
Yet,  with  a  curious  want  of  appreciation,  the  suitor  was  turn- 
ing his  back  upon  the  most  adorable  of  them  all. 

The  cartoonist  overlooked  that  "  Zion  "  was  not  in  the  mar- 
riage market.  She  was,  in  fact,  already  disposed  of;  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Grand  Signior's  harem,  and  very  jealously  guarded. 
"  Uganda  " —  by  which,  of  course,  was  meant  British  East  Af- 
rica —  was  at  least  virginal.  At  the  time  Mr.  Joseph  Cham- 
berlain made  his  celebrated  offer  of  one  of  its  plateaus  to  Dr. 
Herzl,  the  future  of  the  country  was  embryonic.  The  white 
population  settled  in  its  vast  area  could  not  have  filled  a  village 
church.  And  when  the  Ito  won  Mr.  Chamberlain's  assent  to 
the  project  of  converting  the  entire  territory  into  a  British 
Judaea,  with  a  Jewish  Governor,  a  country  to  be,  when  devel- 
oped, an  equal  member  of  the  great  family  of  nations  which  con- 

277 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

stitute  the  British  Empire,  a  prospect  was  opened  out  of  a 
really  great  Jewish  future.  But  the  Ito's  elaborate  memoran- 
dum on  the  subject  remains  in  the  archives  of  the  British  Co- 
lonial Office. 

A  further  possibility  investigated  by  the  Ito  was  Canada, 
where  a  population  smaller  than  that  of  London  occupies  an  area 
nearly  as  large  as  Europe.  Sir  Wilfrid  Laurier,  then  at  the 
height  of  his  power,  said  to  the  writer  in  1907  :  "  You  are  ten 
years  too  late.  Ten  years  ago  we  were  begging  for  immigrants 
and  would  gladly  have  given  you  a  tract  under  local  autonomy 
to  be  developed  into  one  of  the  States  of  a  federal  Canada. 
Now  we  have  all  the  immigration  we  need  and  will  give  land  only 
to  the  individual."     And  Lord  Strathcona  said  the  same. 

"  Ten  years  ago!  "  But  that  had  been  just  the  date  of  the 
first  Basle  Congress.  Had  Jewry  really  come  together  to  take 
counsel,  had  it  opened  its  eyes  and  looked  round  the  world  in- 
stead of  shutting  them  and  swallowing  the  formula  stuffed  into 
its  mouth  by  the  pre-existing  Choveve  Zionists  (Small  Colonisa- 
tion Zionites),  the  first  thing  it  would  have  perceived  would 
have  been  Canada  and  the  great  healthy,  fruitful  spaces 
thereof,  and  it  would  have  made  instant  application  to  the 
Canadian  Government. 

Sir  Wilfrid  Laurier  added  that  if  we  chose  to  send  out  our 
men  —  each  to  make  individual  application  for  his  160  acres  — 
and  if  we  so  planned  their  holdings  as  to  produce  a  Jewish 
commonwealth,  the  Canadian  Government  would  not  try  to 
thwart  a  scheme  executed  under  its  constitution. 

But  to  carry  out  such  a  scheme  without  the  glamour  and  pro- 
tection of  public  policy,  without  a  charter  and  a  flag,  and  in 
face  of  the  Zionist  clamour  and  the  anti-Zionist  outcry,  did  not 
seem  feasible.  Nor  did  the  numerous  perspectives  tentatively 
explored  by  the  Ito  in  Australia,  Mexico,  and  South  America 
seem  more  calculated  to  produce  the  necessary  unity. 

Even  when  the  Ito  put  forward  Mesopotamia  —  the  primi- 
tive Jewish  land,  the  cradle  of  the  race  and  the  conservatory  of 
its  purity,  as  well  as  the  subsequent  focus  of  Judaism  for  a 
thousand  years,  the  seat  of  its  most  famous  academies  and  the 
birthplace  of  the  Babylonian  Talmud  —  there  was  no  sign  of 
Zionist  sympathy,  and  this  though  Mesopotamia  came  within 
the  ambit  of  the  official  programme  of  Zionism,  and  offered  a 
far  greater  possibility  than  Palestine  of  a  territory  on  an  ade- 
quate scale.  That  the  Ito's  project  was  not  chimerical  has 
been  proved  by  the  irrigation  work  executed  on  its  very  lines 

278 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

both  by  Sir  William  Willcocks  for  the  Sultan  and  by  the  Brit- 
ish troops  for  their  own  purposes. 

The  fact  was  that  the  Zionists  could  not  rise,  and  have  not 
yet  risen,  to  the  conception  of  Territorialism.  They  have  been 
at  most  mere  Palestinians,  hovering  like  ghosts  over  the  grave 
of  their  past,  and  unable  to  make  an  act  of  fresh  faith.  This 
was  intelligible  enough  in  the  orthodox,  but  that  advanced  Jew- 
ish thinkers  —  and  the  majority  of  the  Zionist  delegates  had 
thrown  over  the  Mosaic  code  —  should  babble  equally  about  the 
irreplaceability  of  Palestine,  is  a  proof  of  the  paralysis  to 
which  centuries  of  oppression  and  superstition  can  reduce  a 
people. 

XI 

Immense  as  are  the  difficulties  in  the  way  of  Territorialism, 
they  cannot  be  said  to  be  absolutely  insuperable  even  now ;  while 
in  the  past,  when  new  continents  lay  practically  unpopulated, 
a  Jewish  State  could  have  been  carved  out  with  comparative 
facility.  The  history  of  Israel  is  a  story  of  lost  opportunities. 
If  onl}r  the  exiles  from  Spain  had  followed  in  the  wake  of  Co- 
lumbus!  Even  in  1825,  when  Major  Noah  conceived  his  pro- 
ject of  a  regathering  of  Israel  within  sound  of  Niagara  Falls, 
the  matter  of  his  scheme  was  far  less  fantastic  than  the  manner, 
and  had  the  European  Ghettos  to  which  he  addressed  his  ap- 
peal been  sufficiently  prepared  by  propaganda,  the  great  city  of 
Buffalo  would  by  now  have  been  Jewish,  with  a  Jewish  major- 
ity in  New  York  State.  When  after  the  pogroms  of  the 
'eighties  the  great  stream  of  Jewish  emigration  to  America  be- 
gan, one  of  the  few  statesmanlike  Jews,  Judge  Sulzberger,  sug- 
gested that,  instead  of  receiving  it  into  the  cities,  it  should  be 
diverted  to  a  sparsely-populated  territory,  which  would  then, 
automatically  under  the  Constitution,  evolve  into  a  Jewish 
State.  But  the  suggestion  was  not  followed,  and  instead  of  a 
new  member  being  added  to  the  United  States,  practically  a 
new  Jewish  Pale  was  built  up,  and  a  new  series  of  Ghetto 
slums. 

Perhaps  it  is  even  now  not  too  late  to  pour  a  stream  of  Jew- 
ish migration  upon  a  thinly  occupied  territory  in  America  — 
North  or  South  —  or  in  Australia.  There  may  even  be,  under 
the  new  Russian  regime,  ample  territory  in  the  vast  and 
sparsely-settled  stretches  of  Siberia,  for  Jews  to  build  up,  un- 
der amicable  auspices,  a  State  of  their  own. 

279 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

But  none  of  these  ideas  can  hope  for  a  hearing  at  present, 
for  by  one  of  those  unexpected  happenings,  which  are  the  only 
certainties  in  history,  Zionism  has  received  from  Great  Britain, 
with  the  support  of  other  Great  Powers,  the  promise  that  "  a 
Jewish  National  Home"  shall  be  established  in  Palestine,  and 
while  the  possibility  of  this  project  is  on  trial  the  Pro  naturally 
lavs  aside  any  rival  activities,  hoping  even  that  its  ends  may  be 
attainable  within  the  same  territory.  Unhappily,  the  prospect 
of  turning  Palestine  into  "  a  territory  upon  an  autonomous 
basis  for  those  Jews  who  cannot  or  will  not  remain  in  the  lands 
in  which  they  live  at  present  "  is  not  altogether  hopeful.  The 
facts  of  geography  and  history,  which  Zionists  have  always  re- 
fused to  look  in  the  face,  cannot  be  abolished  by  State  procla- 
mations, and  now  that  the  dream  bids  fair  to  take  on  reality, 
the  happiness  produced  by  the  British  promise  must  inevitably 
be  shadowed  by  these  disagreeable  obstacles  and  drawbacks. 

As  a  territory  Palestine  cannot  be  said  to  be  capacious,  and 
even  of  its  exiguous  area  the  Syrian  Christmas  claim  (for 
France)  a  goodly  northern  slice.  Still,  it  is  not  too  small  to 
produce  that  richness  and  variety  of  life  which  go  to  make  a  na- 
tion, and  now  that  we  are  aware  that  the  accommodation  of 
the  Diaspora  is  no  part  of  a  sane  Territorialism,  we  need  not 
twit  Zionism  with  the  false  hopes  it  once  raised  among  the  suf- 
fering masses  of  the  Pale.  We  need  only  consider  whether  "a 
Jewish  National  Home  "  can  be  established  within  this  area,  in 
accordance  with  the  promise  of  Great  Britain. 

Unfortunately,  that  very  promise  is  hedged  with  a  condi- 
tion which  makes  it  practically  a  contradiction  in  terms,  for 
"  nothing  shall  be  done  which  may  prejudice  the  civil  and 
religious  rights  of  existing  non-Jewish  communities  in  Pales- 
tine." 

With  her  delicate  relation  to  the  Arab  and  her  position  as  a 
Mohammedan  Power,  Great  Britain  could  not  easily  act  other- 
wise, nor  could  Jews  demand  any  restriction  of  native  rights  so 
long  as  the  tribes  remain  in  Palestine.  But  as  it  happens  that 
these  tribes  outnumber  the  Jews  by  more  than  six  to  one,  it  is 
not  easy  to  see  how  (short  of  amicably  buying  out  the  more  no- 
madic and  loosely-rooted,  and  resettling  them  in  the  vast  new 
Arab  kingdom  which  is  being  set  up  simultaneously)  Palestine 
can  become  either  Jewish  or  national  or  a  home.  Under  any 
system  of  constitutional  Government  there  would  arise  an  Arab 
national  autonomy,  not  a  Jewish.      "  The  balance  of  power  in  a 

280 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

State,"  writes  Lord  Morley,  "  exists  with  the  class  that  holds 
the  balance  of  the  land."  And  so  far  the  Jews  hold  only  2 
per  cent,  of  it.  Nor  can  the  atmosphere  of  Palestine  —  so 
largely  saturated  with  Christian  and  Mohammedan  emanations, 
to  which  incessant  pilgrimages  will  now  more  than  ever  con- 
tribute —  become  as  Jewish  as  a  Ghetto  of  the  Diaspora  for  a 
Territorial  State  on  virgin  soil.  To  adopt  the  image  of  our 
Yiddish  cartoonist,  Zion  is  a  bride  who  after  her  divorce  from 
Israel  has  been  twice  married  to  Gentiles  —  once  to  a  Christian 
and  once  to  a  Mohammedan  —  and  when  Israel  takes  her  back 
he  will  find  his  household  encumbered  with  the  litter  of  the  two 
intervening  mcnages.  Such  considerations,  however,  are  still 
invisible  to  the  stock  Zionist  on  whose  self-spun  structures  reali- 
ties impinge  in  vain,  and  whose  Zion  is  as  much  a  city  of  dream 
as  that  builded  on  celestial  foundations  by  the  popular  imagina- 
tion yearning  for  the  Messiah.  As  Don  Quixote  could  see 
great  armies  with  banners  where  Sancho  Panza  could  see  only 
flocks  of  sheep,  so  our  dreamers  of  the  Ghetto  see  a  full  national 
life  where  a  sober  observer  can  see  only  a  few  farm  colonies  in 
an  overwhelmingly  alien  environment.  And  yet  when  theology 
gives  place  to  politics,  when  Zionism,  abandoning  the  dream  of  a 
heaven- wrought  millennium,  proclaims  the  manlier  programme 
of  self-achieved  redemption,  its  first  duty  surely  is  to  face  polit- 
ical facts. 

It  is  true  that  the  Jews  will  be  an  intensive  minority  in  con- 
trol of  the  economic  development  of  the  country,  and  that  Jew- 
ish immigrants  will  have  the  happy  sense  of  coming  home. 
But,  so  far  as  the  historic  Palestine  west  of  the  Jordan  is  con- 
cerned, unless  heroic  measures  are  taken,  which  are  utterly 
unlikely  —  for  the  Zionist  leaders  are  resolved  on  the  less  dif- 
ficult policy  of  friendly  co-operation  with  the  Arab  —  nothing 
approaching  a  Jewish  commonwealth  can  possibly  grow  up 
there,  and  the  Zionist  settlers  will  be  lucky  if,  under  the  asgis 
of  Britain,  they  can  change  into  friendship  the  hitherto  men- 
acing hostility  of  the  native  majority. 

It  is  only  in  the  comparatively  unpopulated  regions  to  the 
east  of  the  Jordan  that  a  sort  of  Hebrew  Montenegro  is  not 
unattainable,  though  as  a  province  without  independence  and 
as  part  of  a  miniature  Austria.  Under  the  success  of  Zionism 
not  only  will  Israel  be  divided  into  Diaspora  Jews  and  Palestine 
Jews,  but  Palestine  Jews  will  themselves  be  divided  into  locally 
autonomous  Jews,  and  Jews  hopelessly  mixed  up  with  other 

281 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

races.  Thus  instead  of  normalising  Israel's  life,  Zionism  will 
make  it  still  more  abnormal.  A  motherland  that  holds  only  a 
tithe  of  its  sons,  and  even  those  largely  interblent  with  other 
peoples,  will  not  cease  to  be  an  anomaly. 

But  Zionism  has,  of  course,  long  given  up  pretending  to  a 
Territorial  solution.  With  its  shrewd  policy  of  cutting  its 
coat  according  to  its  cloth  and  changing  its  aim  into  whatever 
it  can  get,  it  now  aspires  only  to  a  spiritual  centre.  This  is 
the  conception  of  Achad  Ha-am,  and  it  may  be  magnificent. 
But  it  is  not  Zionism.  It  is  not  the  gospel  of  redemption 
preached  at  Basle. 

It  is  not  even  intelligible.  A  spiritual  centre,  round  which 
the  Jews  of  the  Diaspora  are  to  group  as  a  political  nationality, 
which  nationality  is  to  be,  however,  in  no  contradiction  with 
their  local  nationality  as  Englishmen,  Frenchmen,  or  Germans 
—  here  is  a  conception  which  goes  dangerously  near  nonsense 
and  nonsensically  near  danger.  Only  if  the  whole  world  after 
the  war  is  organised  internationally  will  such  a  political  broth- 
erhood of  Israel  become  feasible.  But  otherwise  such  a  bond 
is  as  superfluous  as  it  is  impracticable.  For  the  disruption  of 
the  Diaspora  will  have  been  aggravated  by  the  war.  The  par- 
tition of  Russia  and  Austria  has  broken  up  even  the  solidarity 
of  the  Pale,  while  the  threatened  split  of  the  world  into  a  Ger- 
man-Russian sphere  and  a  League  of  other  Nations  would  im- 
port a  still  more  fatal  scission. 

So  long,  however,  as  the  Disapora  believes  in  Judaism,  it  has 
no  need  of  a  spiritual  centre.  The  Torah  is  its  spiritual  cen- 
tre. But  if  it  has  lost  this  centre,  then  to  replace  the  religion 
which  has  kept  the  Diaspora  alive  nearly  two  thousand  years, 
and  which  is  a  solid  reality  coming  home  to  the  Jew  at  every 
hour  of  the  day,  by  an  absentee  nationalism  so  tenuous  that 
another  and  a  nearer  nationalism  can  occupy  his  heart  simul- 
taneously and  claim  even  the  sacrifice  of  his  blood,  this  is  a 
conception  which  could  occur  only  to  visionaries  ignorant  of 
life,  or  bankrupt  politicians  clutching  at  any  expedient  to  save 
their  faces.  A  "  spiritual  centre  "  in  Zion  may  suffice  to  hold 
within  its  ghostly  radius  the  first  generation  of  absentee  Zion- 
ists minus  Judaism;  such  a  phantasm  without  either  political  or 
religious  substance  will  not  avail  to  keep  their  children  Jew- 
ish. The  young  generation  will  crave  less  windy  nourishment 
and  a  more  solid  ground  for  separation  from  the  general  life. 
No  minority  in  history  has  ever  sustained  itself  in  the  bosom 
of  a  majority  unless  fortified  by  a  burning  faith. 

282 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

xn 

Assuming,  however,  that  the  Zionists  will  be  sensible  enough 
to  adopt  the  Ito  formula,  we  must  confess  that  their  prospects, 
poor  as  they  are,  are  on  the  surface  greater  than  those  of 
Moses.  For  Palestine  was  far  more  densely  populated  in  the 
days  of  the  Exodus  from  Egypt  than  it  is  now,  and  although 
Joshua  came  as  a  victorious  invader,  yet  victories  do  not  always 
assure  the  dominancy  of  the  invaders.  Autochthones  cannot 
always  be  all  annihilated  or  all  expelled,  and  they  often  absorb 
their  conquerors,  as  the  Saxons  in  Britain  absorbed  the  Nor- 
mans. "  I  will  not  drive  them  out  from  before  thee  in  one 
year,"  God  explains  to  Moses,  "  lest  the  land  become  desolate 
and  the  beasts  of  the  field  multiply  against  thee.  By  little  and 
little  I  will  drive  them  out  from  before  thee,  until  thou  be  in- 
creased and  inherit  the  land."  What  an  admission  that  the 
conquest  and  occupation  of  Canaan  proceeded  not  by  miracle, 
but  by  natural  law!  The  Deity's  views  are  obviously  not  or- 
thodox. How  easily  the  beasts  could  have  been  kept  down  by 
Providence,  and  the  pace  of  Israel's  increase  and  settlement 
precipitated !  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  tribes  in  possession  re- 
mained largely  on  the  soil,  profiting  by  this  breathing  space  to 
intermarry  "  little  by  little  "  with  their  invaders,  and  the  nation 
that  grew  up  in  Palestine  was  a  blend  of  all  its  races  on  a  He- 
brew basis.  The  Biblical  Palestine,  like  all  other  countries,  was 
a  melting-pot. 

But  such  a  development  —  and  the  situation  is  not  without 
its  irony  —  is  unlikely  in  the  Palestine  of  to-day.  For,  partly 
on  account  of  the  inevitably  exaggerated  race-consciousness  of 
the  pioneer  Jews,  but  even  more  because  of  the  great  Diaspora 
behind  them,  they  will  be  kept  from  intermarrying  with  the 
tribes  in  possession.  They  will  feel  members  of  Jewry  rather 
than  citizens  of  Palestine.  It  is  the  Diaspora  that  will  keep 
Palestine  Jewish,  rather  than  Palestine  the  Diaspora.  Just  so 
the  isolation  of  Ulster  is  nourished  by  the  kindred  Protestant- 
ism of  Great  Britain,  and  the  amalgamation  of  Austria  has 
been  impeded  by  the  existence  beyond  its  frontiers  of  powerful 
aggregations  of  its  constituent  races. 

The  validity  of  this  analysis,  though  it  has  been  reached 
mainly  on  a  'priori  grounds,  may  be  illustrated  by  what  hap- 
pened on  the  return  of  the  Jews  from  Babylon.  Here,  too, 
there  was  a  great  body  of  Jewry  behind  them,  though  it  was 
mainly  concentrated  in  Babylon.     And  the  first  result  was  the 

283 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

super-piety    by    which    Ezra    and    Nehemiah    weeded    out    all 
"  alien  "  wives,  and  imperilled  the  stability  of  the  State  by  re- 
jecting the  communion  of  the  Samaritans.     Very  different  is 
the  story  of  the  first  Hebrew  comers  to  Palestine.     They  did 
not  leave  behind  them  in  Egypt  a  great  Hebrew  settlement  to 
chain  them  to  the  past  and  restrain  them  from  fusing  with  the 
new  peoples  they  were  to  meet.      Nay,  at  the  very  beginning  of 
their  adventure  they  took  up  a  "  mixed  multitude  "  of  the  old 
peoples  with  them.      But   the  Jews  who  emigrate  to  Palestine 
to-day  will  have  a  tar  more  tribal  mentality,  and  so  no  neo- 
Jewish  race,  no  synthesis  of  the  Semitic  tribes  of  Palestine,  is 
likely    to   be   again   evolved   to   people   and   possess   Palestine. 
I  knee  the  difficulty  arising  from  the  native  tribes  is  greater 
than  in  ancient  Palestine ;  for  they  can  neither  be  expelled  nor 
absorbed.     Palestine  must  thus  become  a  mongrel  State :  at  best 
it  can  become  a  Semitic  Switzerland  of  which  all  the  constit- 
uents will  enjoy  political  equality  —  no  undesirable  ideal,  in- 
deed a  consummation  devoutly  to  be  wished  everywhere  else,  but 
unfortunately  irrelevant  to  the  particular  problem  which  Zion- 
ism started  out  to  solve,  especially  as  this  ideal  is  unlikely  to 
be  achieved  wherever  else  Jews  dwell.     Thus  around  this  hy- 
brid centre  —  according  to  Zionist  doctrine  —  a  long  series  of 
overruled  or  oppressed  Jewries  will   eternally   gravitate,   the 
Galut  being  perpetuated  by  the  very  movement  which  started 
out  to  abolish  it. 

It  has  been  suspected  that,  though  Israel  has  been  preserved 
in  the  Galut  by  his  religion,  his  religion  is  in  reality  only  the 
mask  of  his  invincible  will  to  live,  of  which  will  the  "  hard-shell  " 
Judaism  that  replaced  the  Jewish  State  was  a  secretion.  That 
the  race  instinct  has  invented  and  is  exploiting  Zionism  is  a 
still  more  plausible  hypothesis.  With  the  diminution  of  faith 
and  the  relaxation  of  ritual  a  new  protective  device  was  neces- 
sary. Hence  the  prospect  that  Zionism,  like  Balaam,  will  bless 
what  it  came  to  curse,  and  keep  alive  what  it  came  to  destroy, 
is  not  so  paradoxical  as  it  seems. 

Nevertheless,  though  the  Diaspora  survive,  a  more  national 
kind  of  Jewish  life  may  well  arise  east  of  the  Jordan,  and  even 
west  of  it  Hebrew  is  already  becoming  again  a  living  speech. 
Such  a  resurrection  —  however  partial  —  would  be  a  valuable 
vindication  of  the  power  of  a  people  to  outlive  its  persecutors, 
and  would  add  a  unique  and  romantic  chapter  to  history.  But 
"  the  Mission  of  Israel  "  would  not  be  furthered  unless  a  civi- 
lisation higher  than  the  normal  was  developed  in  that  more  com- 

284. 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

pact  section  where  Hebrew  idealism  would  have  comparatively 
free  play.  Here,  then,  is  the  true  task  for  Zionism,  and  a  fur- 
ther reason  why  the  largest  possible  measure  of  autonomy  and 
concentration  is  essential. 

Since,  however,  the  Diaspora  cannot  but  survive  the  com- 
pletest  possible  triumph  of  Zionism  —  since,  indeed,  according 
to  the  latest  gospel,  its  survival  will  be  part  of  the  triumph  of 
Zionism  —  its  religious  problems,  like  its  political  problems, 
will  still  remain  clamouring  for  solution.  Not  even  by  seeking 
refuge  in  Zion  can  Judaism  escape  that  religious  reconstruction 
which  modern  thought  has  long  been  imperatively  demanding, 
and  which  the  breakdown  of  the  old  order  under  stress  of  war 
has  made  inevitable  for  all  religions  alike.  Indeed,  a  Zionism 
that  frankly  abandoned  the  ideal  of  a  tribal  centre  for  the 
Diaspora,  and  set  up  on  Mount  Zion  a  centre  of  teaching  for 
the  whole  human  race,  would  be  both  freer  from  practical  diffi- 
culties and  nearer  to  the  essence  of  Judaism  and  Jewish  history. 


285 


THE  OLD  CLO'  MAN 

(Voices,  June,  1920) 

Three  battered  hats  upon  his  head, 
And  curved  beneath  his  bag, 

The  ancient  limps  with  brooding  tread. 
Amid  the  city's  brag. 

It  is  a  day  of  rocking  bells 

And  prancing  King  and  Court, 

A  day  when  marching  music  swells 
And  alien  oafs  make  sport. 

They  harry  him,  these  Christian  louts, 
With  stones  and  clownish  freaks, 

His  hand  mechanic  flicks  the  clouts 
Of  mud  from  oft'  his  cheeks. 

Blood  trickles  down  his  long  white  beard 

To  badge  his  gaberdine ; 
He  is  unused  to  go  un jeered, 

Or  mark  the  outer  scene. 

Nor  merry  banners,  purple  posts, 

Nor  blazoned  floral  hails, 
Nor  hoarse  huzzahing  heathen  hosts 

Can  pierce  his  mental  veils. 

The  Titan  City's  domes  and  spires 

As  little  take  his  eye: 
Her  airy  leagues  of  living  wires 

'Her  planes  that  taunt  the  sky. 

The  martial   pageant  winds  within 

The  noble  storied  fane, 
The  soaring  organ  notes  begin 

Their  jubilant  refrain. 

A  thousand  flag-dressed  merchant  ships 
The  river's  rapture  scream, 
286 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

They  bring  no  shadow  of  eclipse 
To  dim  his  pious  dream. 

He  ponders  on  a  Hebrew  text, 
Long  old  when  Rome  was  new, 

And,  like  a  student  vaguely  vext, 
Holds  tighter  to  his  clue. 

And  as  the  happy  Gentiles  bawl 

The  glory  of  their  race, 
He  flicks  the  giant  capital 

Like  the  mud  from  off  his  face. 

Poor  howling,  pork-fed  brutish  horde 
That  know  not  Israel's  God, 

Vain,  vain,  their  Empire  of  the  sword, 
Their  ruthless  ruling  rod. 

Their  city  dwindles  into  dust 

Before  Jehovah's  fire, 
And  all  that  mighty  life  and  lust 

Join  Babylon  and  Tyre. 

He  sees  her  princes'  skulls  dug  up 
Where  stand  her  abbey  walls, 

And  bats  and  cockatrices  sup 
Within  her  palace  halls : 

While  in  some  pagan  city  new, 

Whose  name  none  yet  can  know, 

Still  to  their  God  and  Torah  true, 
The  chosen  cry  "  Old  Clo' !  " 


287 


THE  MIRAGE  OF  THE  JEWISH  STATE 


"  Life  caricatures  our  concepts,"  complained  Dr.  Herzl  to 
me  in  the  early  days  of  his  movement,  and,  indeed,  History  has 
few  grimmer  ironies  to  show  than  that  his  noble  and  pacific 
vision  of  the  Jewish  State  should  draw  its  hopes  of  realisation 
from  the  bloodiest  war  in  history,  or  that,  on  the  embodiment 
of  Mr.  Balfour's  promise  in  the  Turkish  Peace  Treaty,  a  Zion- 
ist leader  in  Jerusalem  should  have  ordered  the  Shofar  to  be 
sounded  as  at  the  coming  of  the  Messiah;  and  have  thus  of- 
ficially identified  a  dubious  political  transaction  with  the  "  one 
far-ofF  divine  event  "  for  which  Jewish  mysticism  has  waited 
nigh  two  thousand  years.  It  is  only  another  proof  of  the  de- 
moralising effects  of  racial  egotism  and  political  faction. 

It  is  true  that  the  dispossession  of  the  Turk,  the  assassin  of 
the  Armenians,  and  the  despoiler  of  Palestine,  is  a  process  that 
makes  for  righteousness,  and  the  yearning  of  the  Jewish  soul  to 
which  Jehuda  Halevi  gave  such  touching  expression  is  an  emo- 
tion of  no  small  spiritual  potency.  But,  unfortunately,  the 
disingenuous  handling  of  the  new-fangled  mandatory  system, 
the  cynical  flouting  of  the  League  of  Nations  on  which  it 
professes  to  depend,  reduces  the  world  again  from  a  common- 
wealth to  a  cockpit,  and  in  such  a  welter  there  can  be  for  Jewry 
neither  spiritual  nor  political  salvation. 

At  first,  indeed,  it  seemed  as  if  the  ancient  belief  that  asso- 
ciated the  return  of  the  Jews  to  Palestine  with  a  millennial  or- 
der would  be  realised  by  the  triumph  of  the  Wilsonian  prin- 
ciples. But  these  high-flown  dreams  have  proved  to  be  only 
the  outcome  of  the  opium  with  which  humanity  was  drugged 
to  continue  its  mutual  butchery,  and  the  awakening  has  found 
the  patient  paying  as  usual  for  intoxication  by  depression  and 
K  at  zen jammer.  That  the  Jews  should  nevertheless  sing  Ho- 
sannas  might  at  first  seem  a  welcome  exception  to  the  prevail- 
ing pessimism :  as  welcome  an  exception  as  the  institution  of  a 
Jewish  State  would  be  to  the  prevailing  materialism.  Unhap- 
pily it  is  again  the  optimism  of  the  opium-eater.  The  Oriental 
emotionalism  of  the  race  has  been  exploited,  and  rejoicings  and 

288 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

rhapsodies,  processions  and  synagogical  thanksgivings  which 
might  have  seemed  faintly  in  order  at  the  opening  of  the  first 
Jewish  Parliament  in  a  Palestine  regained,  have  been  lavished 
throughout  the  ghettos  and  Judengassen  of  the  world  at  the 
mere  verbal  prospect  that  England  as  a  mandatory  would  es- 
tablish "  a  Jewish  National  Home  "  there,  though  all  that  was 
clear  was  that  French  Imperialism  had  been  docked  of  part  at 
least  of  the  southern  section  of  Syria,  and  the  British  Empire 
had  been  correspondingly  extended  and  fortified  by  a  new  buf- 
fer-province. Of  the  promise  to  the  Jews  nothing  was  definite 
except  its  negative  clauses,  and  nothing  explicit  save  its  limita- 
tions. Yet  the  nebulous  news  from  San  Remo  sufficed  to  turn 
Jerusalem  from  a  city  of  fasting  and  lamentation  over  the  re- 
cent pogrom  into  a  city  hailing  the  Messiah  with  tuck  of 
trumpet. 

There  is,  indeed,  much  in  common  between  these  hysteric  and 
hyperbolic  manifestations  and  the  popular  frenzy  that  attended 
the  career  of  the  seventeenth  century  Sabbata'i  Zevi,  "  the  Turk- 
ish Messiah  "  of  my  "  Dreamers  of  the  Ghetto."  The  jubilance 
is  even  more  pathetic  in  its  prematurity  and  more  unmanly  in 
its  abandonment  than  those  grotesque  ululations  and  grovel- 
lings  on  the  floor  witnessed  at  the  Zionist  Congress  in  1903, 
when  the  mere  resolution  of  the  majority  to  investigate  the 
British  offer  of  a  territory  in  East  Africa  was  taken  by  the 
fanatical  minority  as  equivalent  to  the  "  surrender  "  of  Pal- 
estine. 

And  this  epidemic  of  ecstasy  is  immeasurably  more  wide- 
spread than  that  delirium  of  grief :  its  ravages  spare  neither  age 
nor  experience.  The  touching  faith  in  British  benevolence  and 
world-philanthropy  is  unalloyed  by  recollection  of  the  pogrom 
which  Jabotinsky  accused  the  British  military  authorities  of 
having  incited,  and  which  at  the  best  they  allowed  to  rage  for 
three  days  against  a  scrupulously  disarmed  Jewry.1  Let  us 
hope  this  incorrigible  belief  in  Britain  will  melt  the  hearts  of 
her  politicians,  and  induce  them  to  take  the  task  of  Jewish  res- 
toration seriously  in  hand.  It  must,  indeed,  be  a  hard  Parlia- 
mentary heart  that  is  left  untouched  by  this  flowery  exuberance 

1  A  Jewish  professor,  of  New  York,  who  happened  to  be  in  Jerusalem, 
writes,  anent  the  outrages  of  April  6th:  "  M.  Hiramali,  an  agricultural  ex- 
pert, was  killed  only  a  few  steps  from  the  British  consulate,  where  they 
refused  him  protection,  saying  they  had  no  instructions  to  grant  it.  .  .  .  All 
the  horrors  were  perpetrated  by  the  Hebronites  who  were  released  from 
prison.  .  .  .  The  British  authorities  permitted  no  one  to  leave  the  town. 
.  .  .  We  could  not  convince  the  British  authorities  that  it  was  necessary  to 
send  soldiers." 

289 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

of  gratitude  from  every  land  of  the  Exile,  or  unshamed  by  this 
unearned  increment  of  benediction. 

Though  Cromwell,  when  he  re-admitted  the  Jews  to  England 
in  1656',  was  swayed  by  millenarian  notions,  these  would  have 
had  little  force  over  his  policy  had  he  not  perceived  the  value 
of  the  Jews  as  Intelligencers  and  promoters  of  his  commercial 
designs.  And  similarly,  though  Mr.  Lloyd  George  is  not  lack- 
ing in  sentimental  sympathy  with  the  Zionist  aspiration,  we 
should  have  heard  little  of  the  "  Jewish  National  Home  "  had 
not  Palestine  subserved  British  political  aims.  It  was  as  a 
military  barrier  for  the  defence  of  Egypt  that  the  acquisition 
of  Palestine  and  its  garrisoning  by  a  Jewish  self-governing  pop- 
ulation was  long  urged  by  the  Manchester  Guardian,  and  this 
mutual  interest  —  do  nt  des  —  would  have  constituted  a  sound 
political  bargain,  had  not  England,  by  a  double-edged  stroke 
of  diplomacy,  contrived  to  ear-mark  Palestine  for  herself  and 
gain  the  sympathies  of  world-Jewry  without  recognising  in 
Israel  anything  but  a  pauper  beneficiary  of  her  idealism.  Her 
strategy  was  the  more  wonderful  inasmuch  as  this  grandiose 
gesture  was  made  at  a  dark  moment  of  the  war,  a  moment  when 
every  little  counted,  and  when  even  France  had  secretly  in- 
structed M.  Picot  to  dangle  before  Jewry  "  the  largest  possible 
hopes  of  Palestine."  The  sole  credit  attaching  to  the  British 
Government  is  that  of  political  sagacity  —  no  small  virtue 
indeed  in  these  days  of  purblind  politics,  and  by  no  means  to  be 
credited  to  the  Zionist  leaders,  who  from  beginning  to  end  have 
played  the  passive  and  impotent  role  of  British  political  agents, 
and  have  now  seen  the  much-trumpeted  "  Jewish  National 
Home  "  whittled  down  to  a  British-Jewish  High  Commissioner 
who  will  naturally  be  as  British  a  Governor  in  Palestine  as  he 
was  a  Home  Secretary  in  England.  Mount  Zion  in  labour  has 
produced  the  mouse  I  foreboded  when  the  renaissance  was  her- 
alded, and  of  the  Lion  of  Judah  there  is  no  sign.  This  does 
not  prevent  the  Zionist  leaders  —  as  we  have  seen  —  from  con- 
tinuing to  blow  the  trumpet.  It  must  be  remembered  in  exten- 
uation that  it  is  their  own  trumpet  which  they  are  blowing. 

Mr.  Frederic  Harrison  has  urged  upon  the  Government,  that 
"  too  many  rash  promises  were  made  in  the  stress  of  war." 
Evidently,  according  to  this  casuist  —  a  religious  leader  to 
boot  —  the  Prussian  doctrine  was  correct,  and  now  that  the 
advantages,  the  imponderdbtUa  as  well  as  the  ponderabilia,  of 
the  Balfour  Declaration  have  been  reaped,  it  can  become  "  a 
scrap  of  paper."     But  why  fall  back  on  so  brutal  a  doctrine 

290 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

when  the  race  to  which  you  pay  a  shilling  in  the  pound  declares 
rapturously  that  you  have  honoured  your  obligation  to  the 
full?  Why  devote  effort  and  brain-work  to  the  tough  problem 
of  creating  a  real  "  Jewish  National  Home  "  in  Palestine  when 
you  give  such  boundless  satisfaction  by  shutting  the  homeless 
hordes  of  Jewry  out  of  it?  The  natives  are  agitated  and 
aggressive.  Why  embroil  yourself  with  them  to  give  the  land 
to  the  Jews,  especially  when  the  Arabs  are  utterly  ungrateful 
for  your  liberating  them  from  the  Turks,  while  the  Jews  will 
bedew  with  tears  of  gratitude  the  hand  that  binds  them? 

We  behold  in  fact  the  curious  phenomenon  that  at  a  moment 
when  Hindoos,  Egyptians  and  Irishmen  vie  with  one  another  to 
shake  off  the  British  yoke,  the  Jews  are  equally  frenzied  to  put 
their  necks  in  it.  They  are  like  castaways  at  sea,  rejoicing  to 
be  picked  up  even  by  a  slaver.  It  is  a  pathetic  testimony  to 
twenty  centuries  of  tossing  on  a  pitiless  ocean.  But  it  is 
equally  a  proof  that  twenty  years  of  Zionism  have  not  availed 
to  restore  the  sapped  national  dignity.  The  immemorial  Pass- 
over aspiration,  "  Next  year  in  Jerusalem !  "  is  followed  in  the 
ritual  by,  "  Next  year  sons  of  Freedom !  "  England's  dole  of 
Freedom  was  meagre  enough,  but  the  Jewish  Oliver  Twists 
actually  ask  for  less,  not  more.  The  very  leaders  of  Zionism 
have  failed  it.  Children  of  the  Russian  Pale,  unaccustomed  to 
an  atmosphere  of  freedom,  and  overawed  by  an  alien  official- 
dom, they  have  not  varied  from  the  Shtadlanim,  the  obsequious 
emissaries  of  Jewry  throughout  the  Ghetto  ages.  Dr.  Weiz- 
mann,  despite  his  frequent  visits  to  Palestine,  brought  never  a 
word  to  London  of  the  contemptuous  attitude  of  the  military 
authorities  towards  the  Jews,  or  of  their  insidious  attempt  to 
burke  the  Balfour  Declaration ;  had  he  done  so,  English  meet- 
ings of  protest  might  have  been  held  and  the  pogrom  in  Jeru- 
salem averted.  Of  him  it  may  be  said,  as  Macaulay  said  of 
Admiral  Torrington  in  the  old  French  war:  "  He  shrank  from 
all  responsibility :  from  the  responsibility  of  fighting,  and  from 
the  responsibility  of  not  fighting;  and  he  succeeded  in  finding 
out  a  middle  way  which  united  all  the  inconveniences  which  he 
wished  to  avoid." 

To  this  day  the  British  Government  has  vouchsafed  no  clear 
explanation  of  Palestine  Jewry's  status,  and  though  Mr. 
Balfour's  letter  carefully  promises  "  a  Jewish  National  Home 
in  Palestine,"  the  Zionists  have  held  thanksgiving  services  in 
the  synagogues  for  "  Palestine  as  a  Jewish  National  Home," 
while  a  message  from  Mr.  Lloyd  George  to  the  Zionist  Congress 

291 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

congratulates  it  on  "  the  restoration  to  the  Jewish  people  of 
their  National  Home."  It  is  impossible  to  keep  pace  with  these 
verbal  juggleries,  all  in  contradiction  of  one  another  and  none 
in  accordance  with  the  facts. 

It  is  urged,  of  course,  that  politics  is  the  art  of  the  prac- 
ticable, and  that  in  accommodating  itself  to  British  policy  and 
Arab  pretensions,  Zionism  has  shown  a  sensible  statecraft.  But 
the  line  of  least  resistance  is  neither  the  path  of  true  statesman- 
ship nor  the  road  of  national  salvation. 

Under  General  Dyer,  Hindoos  had  to  crawl.  But  under 
General  Allenby,  the  Zionist  leaders,  with  the  redeeming  excep- 
tion of  Jabotinsky,  have  needed  no  crawling  order.  Disraeli 
said  of  O'Connell  that  he  had  committed  every  crime  that  did 
not  require  courage.  Dr.  Weizmann  has  displayed  every 
virtue  that  does  not  require  it. 

Although  Messrs.  Lloyd  George  and  Balfour  cannot  be 
acquitted  of  lethargy  and  levity  in  the  whole  business,  they 
have  the  excuse  of  overwhelming  preoccupations  in  every  part 
of  the  world,  and  the  fiasco  of  political  Zionism  would  seem  less 
due  to  any  mala  fides  on  their  part  than  to  the  absence  of 
national  temper  and  creative  courage  in  the  Zionist  leaders, 
who,  belonging  as  they  unfortunately  did  to  cultural  or  agri- 
cultural and  not  to  political  Zionism,  found  themselves  blinking 
at  the  vast  perspectives  so  suddenly  opened  before  them,  and 
recoiled  in  alarm  like  the  man  in  JEsop  who  called  on  Death 
and  when  Death  came  was  taken  aback.  It  is  an  historical 
tragedv,  for  wrong  beginnings  are  almost  impossible  to  rectify. 

In  short,  what  the  dead  founder  of  Zionism  always  appre- 
hended has  come  to  pass.  The  great  moment  has  found  a  small 
people. 

II 

Nothing  could  show  the  fiasco  of  political  Zionism  more 
clearly  than  the  eagerness  of  anti-Zionists  to  take  part  in  the 
work.  Now  that  the  national  movement  upon  which  so  much 
enthusiasm,  eloquence  and  money  have  been  expended,  and  for 
which  Captain  Trumpeldor  died,  crying,  "  It  is  good  to  die 
for  one's  country,"  has  dwindled  to  the  familiar  philanthropic 
task  of  immigration  and  colonisation  under  alien  authority  and 
responsibility,  the  communal  leaders  throw  themselves  into  the 
work  with  their  wonted  beneficence.  The  danger  is  over,  and 
the  Messiah  will  not  come  in  their  time.     They  know  better 

292 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

than  to  believe  that  trumpet.  In  vain  the  Zionists  pretend 
that  the  times  of  Ezra  and  Nehemiah  are  returned,  and  the 
day  of  the  Third  Temple  is  at  hand.  A  profound  instinct,  if 
not  a  reasoned  analysis,  reassures  the  pillars  of  the  synagogue. 
In  truth,  not  even  the  appointment  of  Mr.  Herbert  Samuel 
provides  Judah  with  a  Zerubbabel.  There  is  no  parallel 
between  the  two  historic  moments.  If  by  the  grace  of  Cyrus 
the  Jewish  State  arose  from  its  ashes  and  maintained  itself  for 
six  centuries  longer,  though  under  a  succession  of  suzerains,  it 
was  because  the  new  order  started  under  a  Governor  whose 
function  was  not  to  keep  a  balance  between  the  various  inhab- 
itants but  to  restore  the  Jewish  supremacy,  and  who  was  not 
carefully  labelled  Persian  to  soothe  the  non-Jews.  Cyrus  did 
not  talk  high  morality  and  political  idealism,  he  did  not  under- 
stand that  the  same  petty  territory  could  afford  a  national 
home  to  two  peoples.  He  did  not  make  a  magniloquent  prom- 
ise to  the  Jews  and  then  impose  Persian  law.  Nor  did  he  make 
the  promise  during  the  war  between  the  Persian  and  Babylonian 
Empires,  so  as  to  seduce  the  Babylonian  Jews  from  their  alle- 
giance. With  a  magnanimous  gesture  Palestine  was  restored 
when  victory  was  complete.  Even  the  sacred  vessels  of  the 
Temple  were  handed  back  to  the  returning  exiles.  There  was 
no  Persian  bureaucracy  to  control  their  return.  Their  rhap- 
sodies were  not  illusionary.  Harp  and  psaltery,  cymbal  and 
song  celebrated  a  real  home-coming. 

Despite  the  role  of  espionage  to  which  the  Jews  of  Palestine 
lent  themselves,  and  without  which  General  Allenby's  conquest 
would  have  been  immeasurably  more  difficult  (a  role  redeemed 
from  ignominy  only  by  the  heroism  of  Sarah  Aaronsohn,  who 
though  bastinadoed  and  tortured,  shot  herself  rather  than 
betray  to  the  Arabs  the  headquarters  of  this  secret  service), 
British  gratitude  has  so  far  been  limited  to  rewarding  the  arch- 
spy  and  erecting  a  monument  to  the  martyred  girl.  Of  any 
real  restoration  of  Palestine  to  the  Jews  there  is  not  certain 
indication,  and  our  exiles  of  to-day  return  with  no  assurance 
of  even  ultimate  autonomy,  though  the  women  Zionists  were 
invited  by  their  mesmeric  organisation  to  celebrate  Redemption 
Week  by  throwing  their  jewels  upon  the  altar,  and  all  female 
babies  born  that  week  in  the  Jerusalem  hospital  have  been 
named  Geulah  (Redemption).  With  a  civil  administration 
replacing  the  military  bureaucracy  under  which  the  Hatikvah 
stood  forbidden,  the  national  hymn  may  now  be  sung  only 
within  closed  Jewish  doors ;  while  on  the  Advisory  Council  the 

293 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Jews  are  swamped  by  the  Moslems  and  Christians,  and  all  three 
alike  by  the  British  Government.  This  does  not  prevent  the 
leaders  from  abounding  in  Messianic  manifestoes,  political, 
spiritual,  and  financial.  They  seem  to  have  learnt  from 
Disraeli  that  k*  with  words  we  govern  men." 

So  far  from  the  Zionists  being  in  a  position  to  build  up  the 
model  State  they  proclaim,  even  economic  control  of  the  coun- 
try is  not  to  be  secured  by  their  Organisation  or  Jewry  at 
large,  except  for  individual  concessions,  from  which,  as  from 
immigration  and  colonisation,  they  could  scarcely  have  been 
barred,  had  there  been  no  Balfour  Declaration  at  all.  A 
British  Colony  could  not  well  exclude  the  race,  a  scion  of  which 
is  Lord  Chief  Justice  and  another  the  Secretary  for  India,  and 
which  penetrated  into  Palestine  even  under  the  Turk.  But 
the  immigration  of  Jews  is  to  be  carefully  restricted,  and  not 
directly  by  the  Zionists  themselves ;  and  when  they  do  come  in 
they  will  have  to  face  the  competition  of  the  cheap  and  abun- 
dant Arab  labour.  The  sole  privilege  of  Jewry  will  be  to 
supply  the  capital  for  sustaining  them  in  their  arduous  begin- 
nings —  two  to  three  hundred  pounds  per  immigrant  on  Dr. 
Weizmann's  calculation. 

We  have  only  to  compare  this  negation  of  political  and  eco- 
nomic power  with  the  measure  of  autonomy  offered  by  Joseph 
Chamberlain  in  East  Africa  to  gauge  the  shrinkage  in  Zionism 
that  goes  with  Zion.  The  Chamberlain  concept  of  a  British 
Juda-a  had  already  been  nibbled  down  by  the  Foreign  Office,  but 
even  the  letter  of  Sir  Charles  Hill  to  Mr.  Greenberg  offers  a 
far  higher  political  status  than  that  with  which  Dr.  Weizmann 
has  now  been  fobbed  off  in  Palestine.  Writing  from  the  For- 
eign Office  in  August,  1903,  Sir  Charles  Hill  says  he  is 
instructed  by  Lord  Lansdowne  (the  then  Secretary  for  Foreign 
Affairs)  to  tell  Mr.  Greenberg  that  the  Government  is  prepared 
to  consider  favourably  a  scheme,  the  main  features  of  which 
are  "  the  grant  of  a  considerable  area  of  land,  the  appointment 
of  a  Jewish  official  as  the  Chief  of  the  Local  Administra- 
tion .  .  .  and  local  autonomy,  conditional  upon  the  right  of 
His  Majesty's  Government  to  exercise  general  control  " —  in 
short,  the  establishment  of  a  British-Jewish  Crown  Colony. 

To  Mr.  Barnes,  M.P.,  has  apparently  been  assigned  the  task 
of  defending  the  evisceration  of  the  Balfonrian  promise,  and 
with  a  brazenness  to  be  found  only  in  politicians,  he  has  attrib- 
uted the  pogrom  in  Palestine  to  that  indiscreet  announcement, 
although  it  was  sanctioned  by  the  Cabinet  of  which  he  was 

291 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

himself  a  member!  But  no  verbal  jugglery  can  make  Mr. 
Balfour's  letter  to  Lord  Rothschild  other  than  a  promise  of 
restoration  of  Palestine  to  the  Jews  and  of  the  Jews  to  Pales- 
tine. It  is  true  that  this  document  nowhere  speaks  of  Palestine 
as  a  Jewish  National  Home,  but  only  of  a  Jewish  National 
Home  in  Palestine,  and  that  in  holding  a  service  of  praise  in 
the  Cathedral  Synagogue  thanking  God  for  the  former  conces- 
sion, the  Zionists  have  combined  mendacity  with  blasphemy. 
But  although  it  had  by  then  been  made  clear  to  them  that 
Great  Britain  has  been  granted  no  mandate  for  "  Palestine  as 
the  Jewish  National  Home,"  nothing  can  absolve  Mr.  Balfour 
from  the  responsibility  for  having  promised  it.  For  words 
are  not  the  sole  constituents  of  an  utterance.  The  atmosphere, 
the  "  universe  of  discourse,"  also  counts.  And  it  was  not 
merely  because  of  the  fanfaronades  of  the  Zionists  nor  because 
of  the  prepossession  of  an  ancient  traditional  hope  that  the 
outside  world  —  Moslem  and  Christian  alike  —  read  into  the 
Declaration  the  larger  meaning.  It  was  because  the  air  was 
full  of  the  resurrection  of  peoples,  the  horizon  rosy  with 
national  restorations.  Mr.  Balfour  is  too  old  a  diplomatist 
not  to  have  understood  in  what  sense  his  words,  however 
guarded,  would  be  taken.  And  no  breath  of  disavowal  came 
from  him  when,  at  a  great  Zionist  Demonstration,  members  or 
representatives  of  the  Government  like  Lord  Robert.  Cecil  or  the 
late  Sir  Mark  Sykes  inflamed  the  Jewish  imagination  (and  the 
Arab  resentment),  while  Herbert  Samuel  was  allowed  to  com- 
promise his  reputation  as  a  sober  politician  by  declaring  that 
next  year  would  see  Israel  in  Jerusalem,  according  to  the  im- 
memorial aspiration. 

But  we  do  not  need  these  witnesses  nor  the  unanimous  world- 
Press  to  testify  to  what  Mr.  Balfour  promised.  Fortunately 
we  have  another  utterance  of  his  dated  ten  months  later,  which 
so  far  from  repudiating  repeats  and  embroiders.  On  Septem- 
ber 20th,  1918,  Mr.  Balfour  wrote  a  preface  to  Mr.  Sokolow's 
"  History  of  Zionism."  And  from  this  preface  it  is  clear  that 
he  honestly  meant  to  restore  Palestine  to  the  Jews,  though  he 
had  not  been  sufficiently  advised  of  the  difficulties  of  the  task, 
and  was  reiving  on  Dr.  Weizmann's  ancient,  argumentation  in 
the  East-Africa  crisis.  Remarking  for  example  upon  the 
"  strange  and  unhappy  "  fact  that  the  one  people  for  whom 
race,  religion,  and  territory,  are  uniquely  inter-related  should 
be  the  one  people  without  any  territory  at  all,  the  one  people 
that  has  "  nowhere  been  able  to  create  for  itself  an  organised 

295 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

social  commonwealth,"  he  is  obviously  exposed  to  the  implica- 
tion that  this  "  organised  social  commonwealth  "  was  now  to  be 
set  up,  even  though  it  involved  what  he  calls  a  reversal  of  the 
course  of  history.  And  he  goes  on :  "  If  as  I  believe  Zionism 
can  be  developed  into  a  working  scheme,  the  benefit  it  would 
bring  to  the  Jewish  people,  especially  perhaps  to  that  section 
of  it  which  most  deserves  our  pity,  would  be  great  and  lasting. 
It  is  not  merely  that  large  numbers  of  them  would  thus  find  a 
refuge  from  religious  and  social  persecution;  but  that  they 
would  bear  corporate  responsibilities  and  enjoy  corporate 
opportunities  of  a  kind  which,  from  the  nature  of  the  case, 
they  can  never  possess  as  citizens  of  any  non-Jewish  State." 

Obviously  then  the  advantages  which  they  cannot  possess  in 
a  non-Jewish  State  must  accrue  to  them  as  citizens  of  a  Jewish 
State!  Even  in  this  preface,  Mr.  Balfour,  it  will  be  seen, 
remains  the  politician,  the  airy  avoider  of  the  positive.  But 
with  all  his  caution  he  cannot  avoid  the  affirmation  that  lies 
in  negation  obverted.  Nor  are  more  direct  evidences  wanting, 
though  they  are  never  wholly  unscreened  by  hypothesis. 
"  Those  who  go  to  Palestine  will  not  be  like  those  who  now 
migrate  to  London  or  New  York.  They  will  not  be  animated 
merely  by  the  desire  to  lead  in  happier  surroundings  the  kind 
of  life  they  formerly  led  in  Eastern  Europe.  They  will  go  in 
order  to  join  a  civil  community  which  completely  harmonises 
with  their  historical  and  religious  sentiments;  a  community 
bound  to  the  land  it  inhabits  by  something  deeper  even  than 
custom :  a  community  whose  members  will  suffer  from  no  divided 
loyalty,  nor  any  temptation  to  hate  the  laws  under  which  they 
are  forced  to  live.  To  them  the  material  gain  should  be  great: 
but  surely  the  spiritual  gain  will  be  greater  still."  And  answer- 
ing the  fears  of  the  anti-Zionists  that  (the  italics  are  mine) 
"  their  ancient  home  having  been  restored  to  them,  they  would 
be  expected  to  reside  there,"  he  reassures  them,  denying  only 
the  latter  clause.  He  adds  (and  again  the  italics  are  mine)  : 
"  Everything  which  assimilates  the  national  and  international 
status  of  the  Jews  to  that  of  other  races  ought  to  mitigate  what 
remains  of  ancient  antipathies :  and  evidently  this  assimilation 
would  be  promoted  by  giving  them  that  which  all  other  nations 
possess:  a  local  habitation  and  a  national  home." 

Finally  he  regards  the  problem  in  its  true  light,  not  merely 
as  a  Jewish  problem,  but  also  as  a  world-problem.  But  the 
cloven  hoof  of  the  anti-Semite  which  was  displayed  in  his  con- 
tribution  to   the  East-Africa   controversy,   peeps   out   again. 

296 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Zionism  receives  his  support  as  "  a  serious  endeavour  to  miti- 
gate the  age-long  miseries  created  for  Western  civilisation  by 
the  presence  in  its  midst  of  a  Body  which  it  too  long  regarded 
as  alien  and  even  hostile,  but  which  it  was  equally  unable  to 
expel  or  absorb."  Unless  by  "  age-long  miseries  "  Mr.  Balfour 
means  the  spiritual  miseries  of  hating,  persecuting,  and  mas- 
sacring, by  which  "  Western  civilisation  "  afflicted  its  own  soul, 
this  is  a  very  reprehensible  statement.  The  Jews  have  brought 
"  Western  civilisation  "  not  miseries  but  untold  blessings.  But 
if  Mr.  Balfour's  Zionism  is  an  attempt  to  assist  "  Western 
civilisation  "  to  rid  itself  of  its  unwelcome  foreign  Body,  still 
more  clearly  must  he  have  intended  offering  that  Body  the 
maximum  of  territory  and  opportunity  in  Palestine. 

But  in  the  project  as  it  now  materialises,  a  mere  fraction  of 
this  Body  is  simply  to  change  its  place  of  exile,  and  new  mis- 
eries of  race-friction  are  to  be  created.  "  Now  you  have  got  a 
start,"  ran  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  historic  message  from  San 
Remo.  "  And  it  is  up  to  you  to  make  good."  It  cannot  be  too 
emphatically  recorded  that  no  start  has  been  given  except  for 
colonisation  and  immigration,  and  that  whatever  the  measure 
of  success  reached,  the  gain  will  be  more  to  the  British  Empire 
than  to  Jewry.  For  while  that  Empire  will  be  safeguarded  by 
a  new  barrier  for  the  defence  of  Egypt,  and  enriched  by  a  loyal 
and  industrious  population  that  may  be  used  for  its  battles, 
and  while  its  derelict  acquisition  will  be  converted  into  a  com- 
paratively fruitful  and  self-supporting  colony,  the  Jewish 
problem  will  remain  not  merely  untransformed  but  largely  un- 
alleviated.  There  will  be  neither  quantity  of  salvation  nor 
quality  of  status.  A  common  task  unifies  the  workers,  and 
thus  the  common  concentration  on  Palestine  will  strengthen  and 
perpetuate  the  Diaspora  on  its  present  lines  —  a  dubious  bless- 
ing indeed.  In  the  deal  with  Christendom  the  Jew,  as  usual,  has 
got  the  worse  of  the  bargain. 

Ill 

What  will  be  the  status  of  a  Jew  who  becomes  a  citizen  of 
the  new  (or  nursling)  British  Arab  State  in  Palestine?  Is  he 
by  nationality  British,  Jewish,  Arab  or  Palestinian?  He  will 
become  Palestinian,  it  appears.  But  by  a  strange  ukase  of  the 
Supreme  Council  of  the  Allies,  he  may  also  retain  his  original 
nationality ;  an  arrangement  which  on  the  day  —  if  ever  it 
dawns  —  when    the    State    reaches    full-fledged    independence, 

297 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

will  produce  a  rare  chaos  in  its  constitution.  In  the  meantime, 
since  Palestine  is  supposed  to  be  training  for  self-government 
as  a  ward  of  the  League  of  Nations,  and  Britain  is  merely  the 
transitory  vice-guardian  —  Palestine  citizenship  except  for 
existing  British  subjects  carries  no  rights  in  the  British  Em- 
pire, conveys  no  claims  to  the  Palmerstonian  Civis  romanus 
sum,  nor  any  right  to  land  in  Melbourne,  Montreal  or  London 
except  as  an  alien,  or  even  as  an  Asiatic !  This  will  not  prevent 
the  Jews  of  Palestine  from  being  regarded  as  British  by  the 
rest  of  the  world,  while  the  Jewries  of  the  Diaspora,  from  all 
of  which  energies  and  finances  will  be  streaming  towards  Pales- 
tine, can  scarcely  escape  being  regarded  as  pro-British.  The 
peril  of  such  a  situation  for  non-British  Jews  in  the  event  of  a 
war  between  England  and  other  Powers  possessing  Jewish 
populations  needs  no  accentuation.  After  our  recent  experi- 
ence of  the  temper  and  temperature  of  peoples  at  war,  we  know 
that  the  Jews  will  be  fortunate  if  they  escape  with  simple 
internment.  The  Jews  of  England  hastened  to  form  a  League 
of  British  Jews  to  emphasise  that  they  accepted  no  political 
loyalty  to  the  Jewish  State  that  seemed  to  be  looming.  But 
the  danger  to  them  is  non-existent:  it  is  Leagues  of  French  or 
German  or  American  Jews  that  the  situation  calls  for.  Still 
more  dubious  is  the  position  of  the  Palestine  Jews  themselves 
in  the  event  of  the  mandatory  becoming  involved  in  war. 
Would  Palestine  as  a  ward  of  the  League  of  Nations  be  neutral, 
or  would  England  expect  the  Palestinians  to  rally  to  her 
defence?  Would  they,  protected  by  the  British  Empire  but 
enjoying  no  privileges  in  it,  be  expected  to  share  in  its  mani- 
fold risks?  Very  probably,  though  the  dictionary  defines  a 
mandatory  as  one  who  does  service  without  compensation. 
And  in  the  unhappy  contingency  of  war  with  France,  would 
the  nursling  States  be  expected  to  embrace  the  feud  of  their 
respective  mandatories,  and  British  Palestine  be  involved  in 
combat  with  the  adjoining  French  Syria?  Would  not,  in  such 
a  crisis,  the  Arabs  of  both  countries  join  forces  against  both 
belligerents,  and  Jewry  be  slaughtered  between  the  Moslem  and 
the  Christian?  In  truth,  the  relations  of  mandatories  to  their 
wards  seem  as  shadowy  as  their  own  relations  to  the  League  of 
Nations.  No  fundamental  brain-work  seems  yet  to  have  been 
done  upon  the  whole  subject.  But  perhaps  fundamental  brain- 
work  would  reveal  too  clearly  upon  what  a  filmy  foundation 
political  structures  have  been  reared,  and  politicians,  whether 
Christian   or   Hebrew,   prefer   to   glide   along   in   a  nebulosity 

298 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

which  covers  the  nullity  of  their  concepts,  and  conceals  the 
precipices  over  which  they  career.  The  mandatory  idea  in  fact 
belongs  to  the  concept  of  the  world  as  commonwealth.  It 
cannot  be  applied  to  the  world  as  cockpit. 

The  risks  that  will  arise  to  foreign  Jewries  from  their  sup- 
posed pro-Britishism,  and  to  Palestine  Jews  from  their  resi- 
dence in  the  unholy  land  of  religious  and  political  rivalries, 
would  have  been  worth  running,  had  Israel  really  achieved,  or 
could  he  really  achieve,  independence  there.  But  the  autonomy 
that  lies  in  numbers  is  a  dubious  and  distant  goal,  and  for  gen- 
erations Israel  falls  between  two  stools,  neither  British  nor  non- 
British,  neither  bond  nor  free.  At  best  it  was  doubtful  whether 
in  view  of  the  prophetic  idealism  intertangled  with  Israel's 
national  life,  the  nation  could  afford  to  owe  its  resurrection  to 
opportunism  and  to  the  politicians  of  the  blockade  and  the 
super-Bismarckian  Peace.  Mazzini  with  his  flaming  Repub- 
lican faith  obstinately  refused  to  lend  himself  to  the  monarch- 
ical manoeuvres  of  Cavour.  But  Cavour  did  achieve  the 
Risorgimento,  whereas  Palestine  is  still  irredenta.  An  oppor- 
tunism which  does  not  even  grasp  its  opportunity  is  doubly 
damnable  —  it  is  the  bungling  of  Sancho  Panza  added  to  the 
collapse  of  Don  Quixote.  To  sell  one's  birthright  and  not  even 
get  the  mess  of  pottage ! 

The  tragic  irony  of  the  situation  is  enhanced  by  the  fact  that 
the  state  of  the  Jewish  people  as  a  whole  is  immeasurably 
blacker  than  at  any  time  even  in  its  own  tenebrous  history. 
The  world's  nerves  are  now  so  blunted  by  the  horrors  in  which 
it  has  wallowed  that  it  is  almost  futile  to  draw  attention  to  a 
series  of  massacres,  expulsions,  boycotts,  menaces  and  other 
persecutions  that  outdo  in  their  totality  the  miseries  of  any 
other  people,  the  Armenians  not  excluded.  Yet  vast  sums  that 
ought  to  have  been  used  for  relief  —  and  there  is  talk  of  raising 
twenty-five  million  pounds  —  are  diverted  to  a  project,  which 
could  demand  preference  only  if  it  were  a  real  national  Redemp- 
tion. Whereas  not  only  is  there  no  Jewish  State  within  view, 
but  Palestine  is  not  even  permitted,  or  able,  to  receive  the 
wretched  hordes  streaming  to  beat  desperately  at  her  gates, 
many  of  whom  perish,  perhaps  fortunately,  under  the  hard- 
ships of  the  route  or  in  the  wretched  sailing  smacks  with  which 
they  try  to  cross  the  Black  Sea  or  the  Mediterranean.  The 
same  number  of  the  Jewish  Chronicle  that  contained  the  news 
of  the  incorporation  of  the  Palestine  project  in  the  Turkish 
Peace  Treaty  contained  on  a  single  page  the  following  items  of 

299 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Foreign  News,  the  content  of  which  I  summarise  under  each 
heading. 

German- Austrians  Maltreat  Jews 

Closing  of  Vienna  University  through  a  riot  against  the 
Jewish  students  with  the  destruction  of  their  furniture. 

Another  Ukraine  Massacre 

A  pogrom  in  Podolia  by  the  soldiers  of  General  Bredoff's 
arm}'.  Thirty  Jews  killed,  over  a  hundred  wounded.  Twenty- 
six  Jewesses  raped.      Indescribable  cruelties. 

Riot  at  Kovno 

Victorious  Polish  troops  in  the  Ukrainian  towns  cut  off 
beards  of  Jews  and  then  beat  them. 

Deputy  Farbstein  Attacked 

Soldiers  attack  him  in  the  train.  An  officer  recognises  and 
saves  him. 

Rioting  in  Galicia 

Jewish  quarters  of  Cracow,  Lemberg  and  Grodek  attacked. 
Beards  cut.     Jews  beaten. 

Anti-Semitic  Libel  Exposed 

Appeal  of  Petrograd  Jewish  Bolshevists  to  fellow-Jews  to 
enslave  the  whole  world,  found  to  be  a  forgery  printed  by  the 
pogram  organisers  in  the  Ukraine. 

Vilna  Yiddish  Newspaper  Suspended 

For  printing  the  names  of  the  Jews  killed  in  the  last  pogrom. 

Jewish  Exodus  from  Poland 

A  panic-stricken  flight,  reported  in  The  Times.  700  to 
1,000  passports  applied  for  daily.  100,000  have  received 
passports  and  are  waiting  to  travel  to  the  United  States,  where, 
however,  their  admission  is  doubtful. 

Elections  m  Poland 

A  municipal  election  giving  the  Jews  a  majority,  the  Polish 

300 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

authorities  annulled  it,  and  arrested  the  Jewish  leader  till  the 
elections  were  over. 

Tlie  Alliance  Israelite  and  the  Relief  for  Poland 

Details  of  subscriptions  for  clothes  and  boots  for  the  pogrom 
victims  and  the  many  orphans  of  Eastern  Galicia. 

Outrages  upon  Hungarian  Jewesses 

Drunken  officers  and  soldiers  outrage  interned  Jewesses,  rob 
and  kill  interned  Jews. 

Jewish  Professors  in  Hungary  Boycotted 

Christian  students  boycott  Jewish  professors  and  lecturers. 
Some  resign,  others  are  advised  to  ask  prolonged  leave. 

The  White  Terror  in  Hungary 

700  Jews  disappear  without  leaving  trace.  A  Jewish  mer- 
chant of  Czech  citizenship  who  intervenes  against  the  ill-treat- 
ment of  a  Hungarian  Jew  is  arrested  and  ends  in  an  asylum, 
creeping  under  the  table  when  a  visitor  enters. 

Hungarian  Rabbi  Arrested 

The  Chief  Rabbi  of  Szegedin  arrested  for  a  bitter  speech 
against  Hungary  and  the  Hungarians. 

Jews  Protest  against  Hungary 

Mass  meeting  in  Vienna  to  protest  against  treatment  of 
Jews  in  Hungary. 

A  Terrible  Passover 

Troops  surround  the  Synagogue,  thrash  the  head  of  the 
community  and  all  the  other  congregants.  "  The  soldiers 
seized  an  ailing  Jew  of  sixty-three  years,  cut  his  beard  off,  put 
it  into  grease,  and  compelled  him  to  eat  it" 

Anti-Semitic   Cruelties  in  Hungary 

Hungarian  noblemen  delight  to  torture  Jews.  Count  Salsz, 
for  example,  summons  the  family  of  Simon  Kemoni,  stabs  him 

301 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

to  death,  and  while  the  wife  bends  over  the  body,  dances  in  his 
blood,  shouting  he  is  "  very  pleased  to  smell  Jewish  blood." 

Jewish  Civil  Servants  Barred 

Jews  dismissed  and  barred  from  the  Civil  Service  in  the  Car- 
pathian Provinces  of  Czecho-Slovakia. 

Expulsion  of  Jews  from  France 

Many  Jewish  fugitives  expelled  by  Ministry  of  Interior. 
Many  only  released  from  German  prisons  at  armistice  —  police 
demand  from  them  passports  duly  vised  by  the  French  Consul 
of  the  country  from  which  they  came  —  an  obvious  impossi- 
bility. 

Anti-Semitic   Bluff 

Following  an  anti-Semitic  Mass  Meeting,  an  expulsion  order 
against  all  "  aliens  "  in  Lower  Austria  aimed  at  the  Jewish  fugi- 
tives from  the  East  or  from  the  White  Terror  in  Hungary.  A 
bluff  because  no  trains  to  transport  them. 

Jewish  Students  Excluded 

The  University  of  Graz,  the  capital  of  Styria,  tries  to  copy 
Budapest  University. 

Recipe  against  Judaism 

Reactionary  Austrian  officers  and  Pan-Germans  stir  up  pop- 
ulation against  Jews,  declaring  Austria  must  first  become 
German  so  as  to  fight  the  Judaisation  of  the  world. 

An  Anti-Semitic  Bank 

The  old  Austrian  nobility  establish  a  "  purely  Aryan  "  Bank 
of  Styria,  "  to  stem  the  flood  from  the  East."  The  Chief 
Magistrate  of  Styria  is  the  President  —  a  combination  de- 
nounced in  the  Arbeiter  Zeitung  as  corrupt. 

The  Position  of  Algerian  Jews 

The  Algerian  Jews,  2,000  of  whom  have  died  in  battle  for 
France,  demand  the  abolition  of  political  and  economic  restric- 
tions. 

The  chronicle  flows  on  to  another  page,  for  are  there  not 

302 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

expulsions  from  Bavaria,  pamphlets  distributed  throughout 
Germany  by  the  million,  urging  Jew-massacres,  a  pogrom  even 
in  Jerusalem,  etc.,  etc.?  But  enough!  This,  be  it  marked, 
is  by  no  means  a  bad  page  of  Jewish  news  of  the  week.  There 
is  no  atrocity  on  a  colossal  scale,  such  as  ensanguines  the  record 
in  other  weeks.  It  is  an  average  example  of  the  continuous 
pogrom  in  action,  the  vast  majority  of  the  episodes  in  which 
never  even  find  their  way  into  print,  and  more  than  counter- 
balance any  possible  exaggeration  in  those  recorded.  Such  is 
the  background  of  the  Zionist  rejoicings.  Nowhere  have  "  the 
drums  and  tramplings  "  been  more  continuous  than  in  the 
Jewish  zones  of  Europe:  towns  have  been  taken  and  re-taken 
by  the  rival  armies,  and  the  Jews  massacred  by  all.  Kieff  has 
been  thus  captured  —  to  the  music  of  Jewish  death-rattles  — 
seventeen  times !  And  even  where  Peace  has  slowly  dawned  it 
brings  no  balm  to  the  Ghetto,  for  the  abnormal  accentuation 
of  race-consciousness  in  war-time  has  aggravated  anti-Semitism, 
especially  in  the  beaten  countries.  England  herself  combines 
protection  of  the  Jew  in  Palestine  with  a  restiveness  against 
"  aliens  "  at  home  and  a  tyrannous  deportation  of  as  many  as 
possible. 

Infinitely  more  important  and  urgent,  therefore,  than  any 
pseudo-Restoration  to  Palestine  is  the  problem  of  the  Diaspora. 
The  treaty  for  minorities  drawn  up  by  the  Peace  Conference, 
although  Poland  still  cynically  ignores  it,  has  set  a  standard  of 
political  ethics,  which  the  world  cannot  afford  to  abate.  But 
the  question  remains,  shall  the  Jews  be  recognised  as  national 
minorities,  or  shall  they  simply  exist  as  free  and  equal  citizens 
of  the  majority-State?  The  latter  is  the  form  preferred  by 
the  old-established  English  Jews,  and  corresponds  to  the  fact 
that  national  minorities  do  not  exist  in  England  except 
geographically.  The  other  system,  though  it  has  excited 
apprehension  as  of  a  State  within  a  State,  is  merely  a  similar 
device  for  self-protection,  a  method  of  organising  a  racially 
mixed  State  by  its  constituent  factors ;  a  grouping  by  races 
instead  of  districts.  Since  none  of  these  races  demands  or 
enjoys  a  separate  foreign  policy,  fiscal  system,  or  Parliamen- 
tary assembly,  such  a  constitution  appears  to  offer  the  valuable 
combination  of  variety  with  unity,  and  to  present  a  sort  of 
League  of  Nations  in  microcosm.  It  would  seem  the  only  way 
of  doing  justice  to  the  many  large  racial  minorities  embedded 
amid  majorities  by  the  Peace  Treaties,  and  were  it  applied  to 
Palestine  would  tend  more  truly  to  produce  a  "  Jewish  National 

303 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Home "  therein,  without  prejudice  to  Arab"  rights,  than  a 
British  or  American  voting  system,  especially  if  supplemented 
by  a  Ministry  of  Jewish  Affairs,  such  as  already  exists  in 
Lithuania  and  was  essayed  in  the  unstable  Ukraine.  In  coun- 
tries where  anti-Semitism  reigns,  this  group  system  is  a  guar- 
antee that  the  common  national  Parliament  will  contain  a 
proportional  number  of  Jewish  deputies.  It  is  true  the  Jewish 
vote  might  without  this  arrangement  provide  as  many  Jewish 
or  pro-Jewish  deputies.  But  in  practice  it  has  been  found  — 
as  recently  in  Poland  —  that  the  gerrymandering  of  the  con- 
stituencies so  as  to  water  down  Jewish  majorities  may  leave 
Jewry  without  even  the  requisite  number  of  representatives  for 
an  interpellation  in  the  House.  But  however  this  question  be 
decided,  the  intolerable  conditions  of  Central-European  Jewry 
will  necessitate  a  large  migration  of  the  masses  whom  Palestine 
cannot  receive,  and  who  are  already  taking  the  ancient  road  to 
New  York. 

That  was  the  path  of  salvation  which  the  instinct  of  the 
masses  found  for  itself,  when  the  pogroms  of  the  early  'eighties 
began  to  break  up  Russo-Jewish  life.  There  lay  the  road  to 
safety  and  opportunity.  America  was  the  only  country  of  the 
world  in  which  they  could  arrive  in  their  tens  of  thousands  with- 
out arousing  serious  prejudice.  There,  and  there  alone,  for- 
eignness  was  almost  the  rule  instead  of  the  exception ;  a  score 
of  other  alien  groups  vied  with  the  Jewish  group  and  facilitated 
its  settlement.  And  if  the  Gentiles  tended  to  fuse  less  slowly 
in  the  mammoth  Melting  Pot,  and  if  more  obstinate  Jewry 
found  itself  faced  with  a  new  synthetic  anti-Semitism,  yet  the 
equal  political  right  of  the  Jews  already  in  possession  tended 
to  repress  any  graver  manifestation,  and  every  fresh  Jew 
brought  added  safety  and  political  strength.  America  was, 
after  all,  pledged  to  the  doctrine  of  what  Roosevelt  called  "  the 
square  deal."  There  was  lacking  only  the  ramification  of  the 
stream  of  Jewish  immigration  over  the  country  at  large,  into 
the  West  of  which  it  trickled  too  slowly.  And  this  a  depart- 
ment of  the  Jewish  Territorial  Organisation  strove  to  precipi- 
tate by  constituting  Galveston  an  additional  port  for  Jewish 
immigration  —  an  attempt  which  Zionism  in  its  blindness  with- 
stood, and  which  was  successful  only  to  the  extent  of  settling 
some  ten  thousand  souls  in  the  smaller  Western  towns  as  nuclei 
of  further  immigration.  But  the  vast  area  thus  opened  up 
offers  —  if  autonomy  is  to  be  set  aside  —  a  much  more  prac- 
ticable and  economical  outlet  for  the  swarming,  impoverished 

304 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

and  tormented  Jewries  of  Europe  than  can  be  provided  by  the 
tiny  half-ruined  British-Arab  territory  in  Palestine,  where  the 
mob  that  asks  for  bread  cannot  be  put  off  with  a  stone,  how- 
ever holy.  Unless  Central  Europe  settles  down  to  a  security 
and  prosperity  of  which  there  are  as  yet  no  signs,  or  a  Russia, 
re-established  and  non-reactionary,  supplies  a  nearer  and  more 
attractive  magnet  to  the  Polish-Jewish  masses,  America,  whose 
immigration  laws  will  inevitably  be  relaxed  under  the  dearth  of 
white  labour  and  the  need  of  production,  will  as  inevitably  — 
by  whatever  port  of  entry  —  resume  her  old  place  as  the  Jewish 
land  of  refuge.1 

1  The  latest  statistics  show  37,000  Jews  arriving  in  New  York  within  a, 
few  weeks,  and  the  majority  departing  to  join  their  relatives  in  the  West. 
It  would  thus  seem  that  the  Galveston  work  was  more  successful  than  one 
had  imagined,  and  that,  exactly  as  designed,  the  10,000  souls  planted  in  the 
West  are  now  operating  as  nuclei  to  attract  immigration  from  the  Eastern 
slums. 


305 


"OUR  OWN":  A  CRY  ACROSS  THE  ATLANTIC 

(Written  for  the  Central  Relief  Committee  of  America.) 

Jews  of  the  great  Republic, 

Clasped  to  her  mother-breast, 
Nestling  so  warm  and  peaceful 

Within  that  bosom  blest, 
Turn  to  our  tortured  Europe, 

Hark  to  the  myriad  moan 
Of  pinched  lips,  white  with  hunger, 

That  stiffen  as  they  groan, 
And  remember  in  these  wan  creatures  runs 
the  blood  that  is  your  own. 

Their  sires  and  yours  together 

Bore  Spain's  or  Poland's  scorn; 
With  quenchless  faith  in  marshfires 

They  followed  after  morn. 
They  built  their  house  on  quicksand, 

Or  the  red  volcano's  cone, 
And  every  age  beheld  it 

Engulfed  or  overthrown, 
For  never  in  all  the  ages  did  a  home  remain 
their  own. 

By  devastated  dwellings, 

By  desecrated  fanes, 
By  hearth-stones,  cold  and  crimsoned, 

And  slaughter-reeking  lanes, 
Again  is  the  Hebrew  quarter 

Through  half  of  Europe  known ; 
And  crouching  in  the  shambles, 

Rachel,  the  ancient  crone, 
Weeps  again  for  her  children  and  the  fate  that 
is  her  own. 

No  laughter  rings  in  these  ruins 
Save  of  girls  to  madness  shamed. 
306 


THE  VOICE  OF  JEKUSALEM 

Their  mothers  disembowelled 

Lie  stark  'mid  children  maimed. 
The  Shule  has  a  great  congregation 

But  never  a  psalm  they  drone, 
Shrouded  in  red-striped  Tallesim, 

Levi  huddles  with  Kohn ; 
But  the  blood  from  their  bodies  oozing  is  the 
blood  that  is  your  own. 

Shot,  some  six  to  a  bullet, 

Lashed  and  trailed  in  the  dust, 
Mutilated  with  hatchets 

In  superbestial  lust  — 
No  beast  can  even  imagine 

What  Christians  do  or  condone  — 
Surely  these  bear  our  burden 

And  for  our  sins  atone, 
And  if  we  hide  our  faces,  then  the  guilt  is  as 
our  own. 

Laden  with  babes  and  bundles, 

Footsore  on  every  road, 
Their  weary  remnants  wander, 

With  bayonets  for  goad. 
They  cry :  Shema'  Yisroel 

In  tragic  monotone, 
And  if  ye,  Israel,  hear  not, 

By  whom  shall  ruth  be  shown? 
For  the  strength  whereby  God  saves  us  is  the 
strength  that  is  our  own. 

Alas !  for  the  wizened  infants, 

Sucking  at  stone-dry  breasts, 
Alas !  for  the  babies  writhing 

In  the  grip  of  plagues  and  pests. 
They  are  fever-stricken  and  famished, 

They  are  rotten  of  skin  and  bone, 
Yet  their  mothers  must  die  and  leave  them 

To  suffer  and  starve  alone. 
And  any  one  of  these  children  might  be  your 
very  own. 

Barefoot,  ragged  and  staring 
Like  walkers  in  their  sleep, 
307 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Feeding  on  bark  or  sawdust, 

The  doomed  processions  creep ; 
Crawling  through  marsh  or  snowdrift 

Or  forest  overgrown, 
They  bear  on  high  their  Torah 

Like  a  flag  to  heaven  flown; 
They  prove  how  great  their  spirit,  let  us  prove 
how  great  our  own. 

At  last  but  a  naked  rabble, 

Clawing  the  dust  for  bread, 
Jabbering,  wailing,  whining, 

Hordes  of  the  living  dead; 
Half  apes,  half  ghosts,  they  grovel, 

Nor  human  is  their  tone, 
Yet  they  are  not  brutes  but  brethren, 

These  wrecks  of  the  hunger-zone, 
And  their  death-cry  rings  to  heaven  in  the 
tongue  that  is  your  own. 

Jews  of  the  great  Republic, 

Who  gave  your  sons  to  death, 
That  Peace  be  born  in  Europe 

And  Justice  draw  new  breath, 
Will  ye  still  endure  to  witness 

As  of  yore  your  kindred  thrown 
To  races  whose  souls  are  savage, 

To  tribes  whose  hearts  are  stone, 
Compared  with  the  love  and  mercy  that  for 
ages  have  warmed  our  own? 

Set  your  lips  to  the  Shofar, 

Waken  a  fiery  blast, 
Shrill  to  the  heathen  nations 

This  slaughter  shall  be  the  last! 
And  send  our  old  Peace-greeting 

Pealing  from  cot  to  throne, 
Till  mankind  heeds  the  message 

On  the  Hebrew  trumpet  blown, 
And  the  faith  of  the  whole  world's  peoples 
is  the  faith  that  is  our  own. 


308 


THE  POLISH-JEWISH  PROBLEM 


The  following  remarkable  statement  was  made  in  the  Temps 
of  April  7th,  1920,  by  Signor  Arturo  Cappa,  its  Warsaw 
Correspondent : 

"  A  few  days  ago  I  had  a  conversation  with  M.  Andrew 
Niemojewski,  a  man  of  superior  culture,  who  had  made  a 
speciality  of  the  Jewish  question,  and  is  the  combined  publisher 
and  editor  of  the  journal  My  si  Niepodlegla,  which  has  a  circu- 
lation among  all  the  classes  of  the  population.  I  could  not, 
however,  withhold  my  sense  of  indignation  when  I  heard  from 
him  the  following  utterances: 

"  '  We  are  nozv  preparing  a  pogrom  on  a  larger  scale  than 
the  others;  the  last  gigantic  and  final  pogrom.  In  that  way 
•we  shall  solve  the  Jewish  question  m  Poland.' 

"  When  I  observed  that  it  was  not  possible  to  put  to  death 
15  per  cent,  of  the  population,  and  that  the  conscience  of  the 
whole  world  would  rise  against  such  a  deed,  he  said  in  reply : 

"'And  why  not?  Has  not  the  European  war  sacrificed 
millions  of  lives?  In  face  of  the  universal  Reaction  Poland 
would  come  out  even  greater  and  more  noble.'  " 

M.  Niemo j  ewski's  sentiments  throw  a  lurid  light  upon  the 
ethical  effects  of  the  Great  War  for  Righteousness  and  Free- 
dom. Nor  are  they  peculiar  to  this  "  man  of  superior  cul- 
ture." During  the  war  Mr.  Stephen  Graham  honestly  warned 
us  that  such  was  the  temper  of  the  country  which  England  and 
France  proposed  to  redeem  and  re-establish,  but  I  could  not 
believe  that  it  would  dare  to  betray  its  savagery  to  its  enlight- 
ened saviours.  It  had,  however,  better  taken  the  measure  of 
their  morality,  and  by  its  advance  in  Russia  it  displayed  its 
Prussian  belief  that  success  is  the  only  touchstone  now  in  appli- 
cation or  regard.  As  for  its  common  sense  in  undertaking 
fresh  wars,  this  may  be  gauged  from  the  fact  that  it  has  had 
two  million  cases  of  typhus,  not  to  mention  the  exhaustion  and 
under-feeding  of  the  rest  of  the  population. 

There  is  an  authoritative  statement  available  on  the  condi- 
tion of  the  Jews,  against  whom  M.  Niemojewski  gaily  announces 

309 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

his  crusade.  Mr.  Bernard  Horwich,  representative  of  the 
American  Joint  Distribution  Committee  in  Poland,  a  distrib- 
utor of  the  twenty-five  million  dollars  collected  by  the  American 
Jewish  Relief  Committee,  the  Central  Relief  Committee,  and 
the  People's  Relief  Committee,  says : 

"  Of  the  350,000  Jews  in  Warsaw,  one-quarter  are  famishing, 
135,000  receive  a  mark  a  day.  Persons  die  daily  of  underfeeding. 
Hundreds  of  families  live  on  a  single  plate  of  soup  each  from  the 
soup  kitchen,  and  sometimes  the  soup  is  exhausted  before  the  last 
of  the  queue  is  reached.  Children  of  eight  to  ten  years  are  so  weak 
they  have  to  be  carried,  their  bones  growing  soft.  In  many  houses 
of  Warsaw  bed-linen  is  absent,  having  been  used  up  for  the  corpses. 
Children  of  eight  to  ten  may  be  seen  running  around  the  streets  at 
midnight,  having  lost  all  their  family.  One  boy  of  thirteen  had  the 
charge  of  three  smaller  brothers  and  sisters.  I  saw  eighteen  per- 
sons living  in  a  cold  and  filthy  hole  too  bad  for  a  dog.  They  have 
no  money  to  emigrate." 

Dr.  Haim  I.  Davis,  a  major  in  the  U.  S.  Red  Cross  Commis- 
sion to  Poland,  reported  that  the  younger  generation  of  Jews 
was  virtually  wiped  out. 

"  In  Warsaw,"  he  says,  "  I  visited  the  largest  Jewish  hospital. 
It  had  700  beds  and  was  trying  to  care  for  1,100  patients,  prac- 
tically without  medicine  or  disinfectants  of  any  kind.  There  was 
not  even  any  coal  to  warm  water  for  bathing  the  patients,  for  the 
Poles  were  fighting  one  of  the  other  new  nations  for  possession  of 
the  coalfields. 

"  While  I  was  in  the  hospital  a  Jewish  baby  was  born.  The 
mother  of  that  baby  had  had  no  food  of  any  kind  for  four  days. 
Mothers  in  this  country  can  perhaps  imagine  the  anguish  of  the 
Jewish  mother  who  gave  life  to  the  child  only  to  know  that  it  must 
starve  to  death. 

"  This  case  was  not  the  exception,  but  the  rule.  I  travelled  2,000 
miles  in  Poland,  and  in  every  city,  town  and  village  emaciated  Jew- 
ish children  piteously  cried  for  bread.  Poland  is  a  purgatory,  not 
made  by  God  but  by  man,  and  in  it  human  beings  are  suffering  un- 
tellable  tortures." 

We  may  deduce  that  the  non-Jewish  population  is  in  little 
better  case.  One  may  search  history  in  vain  for  any  record  of 
folly  equal  to  the  fighting  and  persecuting  policy  of  re-born 
Poland. 

And  in  vain,  too,  would  one  search  history  for  a  sadder 
illustration  of  the  demoralising  effects  of  victory.     Here  is  a 

310 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

nation  whose  tragedy  has  much  in  common  with  that  of  Israel, 
a  nation  which  nobly  saved  its  soul  from  the  wreck  of  its  State, 
which  —  torn  into  three  fragments,  complicated  by  a  dias- 
pora —  held  on  for  a  hundred  and  twenty  years,  clinging  to  its 
language  and  its  hope  of  resurrection,  even  sent  its  sons  as 
knights  of  freedom  to  fight  at  all  the  barricades  of  Europe  for 
all  other  forlorn  hopes,  all  other  enslaved  peoples.  Yet  the 
moment  its  liberation  is  achieved,  it  sets  out  —  a  beggar  on 
horseback  —  to  trample  on  other  peoples  both  within  and  with- 
out its  legitimate  ambit,  and  regards  any  remonstrance  — 
even  from  the  Powers  that  have  re-created  it  —  as  a  violation 
of  its  '*  sovereign  rights." 

In  1902  a  German  teacher  flogged  little  Polish  children  for 
refusing  to  say  their  prayers  in  German.  To-day,  especially 
in  the  Ukrainian  provinces,  Ukrainian  children  are  maltreated 
for  refusing  to  speak  Polish.  In  1908,  at  the  invitation  of 
Sienkiewicz,  I  joined  in  the  general  protest  of  European  men 
of  letters  against  the  Prussification  of  German  Poland  by  the 
"  Hakatist  "  policy  of  placing  Germans  on  Polish  land.1 
To-day,  alas !  all  Poland  is  Prussianised  and  in  a  worse  sense. 
For  what  is  now  in  process  is  the  Polonisation  of  Ukrainian 
land.  No  wonder  that  Brandes,  the  most  fervid  appreciator 
of  the  Poles  in  all  literature,  has  now  recanted  his  rhapsodies. 
Required  by  the  Peace  Conference  to  sign  a  clause  for  the  pro- 
tection of  its  minorities,  Poland  fretted  and  fumed  and 
protested  it  was  being  treated  like  a  Central  African  savage 
tribe.  But  I  know  no  African  tribe  that  has  proposed  to 
destroy  three  million  fellow-citizens  of  ancient  standing.  If 
anywhere  there  was  a  case  calling  for  the  appointment  of  a 
Mandatory  Power,  and  for  a  period  of  wardship,  it  was  the 
country  that  could  thus  celebrate  its  re-birth,  and  whose  un- 
bridled recklessness  not  only  nearly  destroyed  itself  over  again, 
but  threatened  to  plunge  all  Europe  into  a  second  great  war. 
Never  was  there  a  more  comical  proclamation  than  that  put 
forward  by  the  Polish  Council  of  National  Defence  when  the 
capture  of  Warsaw  was  imminent.  "  The  nations  of  the 
world,"  said  the  signatories,  "  cannot  be  heedless  to  the  blood- 
shed which  threatens  to  overrun  not  only  Poland  but  also 
threatens  the  right  of  men  and  nations  to  free  and  independent 
existence."     And  rising  to  the  heights  of  grandiose  eloquence, 

i  The  British  policy  of  expelling  settled  German  colonists  from  ex-Ger- 
man East  Africa  shows  that  here,  as  in  other  respects,  we  have  copied  Prus- 
sia and  can  hardly  talk  morality  to  Poland. 

311 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  Wake  up,  nations  of  the  world,"  they  cried,  "  humanity, 
justice  and  truth  call  you!"  I  am  reminded  of  a  repartee  in 
one  of  Sydney  Grundy's  plays.  "  I  demand  justice,"  cries  the 
lady,  and  the  man  replies,  "  Madam,  I  will  do  nothing  so  cruel." 
Nobody  would  wish  to  execute  full  justice  upon  the  Poles, 
especially  when  one  remembers  how  they  have  been  incited  by 
the  Powers  that  should  have  restrained  them.  They  needed 
for  their  young,  amorphous,  and  heterogeneous  State  a  host  of 
financiers,  engineers,  railway  men,  agricultural  and  other  tech- 
nical experts.  The  Powers  sent  them  Military  Missions.  And 
these  Missions  were  not  only  provocative  to  Poland  but  misin- 
formative  to  the  Powers,  haunting  as  they  did  the  officers'  clubs 
and  catching  only  military  refractions  of  the  situation. 

II 

Peoples,  like  books,  have  their  fates,  and  history  has  so  inter- 
twined the  Jews  and  the  Poles  that  early  Polish  coinage  bears 
Hebrew  inscriptions,  and  for  centuries  Poland  has  been  the  very 
centre  of  gravity  for  all  Jewry.  While  the  probable  existence 
of  Jews  in  pagan  Poland  rests  only  on  legend,  there  is  historical 
evidence  that  from  about  the  year  1000,  which  may  roughly 
stand  for  the  date  of  its  Christianisation,  Jewish  communities 
have  flourished  there,  and  their  treatment  by  the  Poles  com- 
pares very  favourably  on  the  whole  with  what  they  had  to 
endure  in~  the  rest  of  Christendom.  In  more  than  one  era 
Poland  was  their  refuge  from  persecution ;  it  was  at  the  invita- 
tion of  its  liberal  and  intelligent  kings  and  under  protection  of 
its  charters  that  Jews  flowed  in  to  fill  many  blanks  and  niches 
in  its  economic  and  industrial  life;  it  was  in  Poland  that  for 
three  centuries  they  enjoyed  an  autonomy  unknown  elsewhere; 
here  were  the  chief  centres  of  Talmudical  study  and  Cabbalistic 
lore,  and  here  arose  the  one  important  heresy  of  modern 
Judaism,  the  joyous  mysticism  of  the  followers  of  "  The  Master 
of  the  Name,"  the  Jewish  St.  Francis. 

After  the  fall  of  Jerusalem,  the  Jews,  amid  obscurer  or  more 
tragic  adventures,  had  found  a  tolerable  home  in  Babylonia, 
and  later  they  had  flourished  for  a  halcyon  century  or  two  in 
the  lap  of  Saracenic  Spain.  But  of  all  their  stepmother  lands 
it  is  Poland  which  has  harboured  the  largest  number  of  Jew., 
and  in  which  for  the  last  five  centuries  they  felt  most  at  home. 
Amid  the  raging  hatred  of  the  rest  of  Europe,  the  statesman- 

312 


THE  VOICE  OF  JEKUSALEM 

ship  of  the  Polish  kings  —  so  much  superior  to  that  of  the 
nobles  or  the  populace  —  and  the  tolerance  due  to  a  dynastic 
marriage  with  religiously  divergent  Lithuania,  combined  to 
establish  Poland  as  the  magnet  of  the  race.  Hither  the  Jews 
poured  to  escape  the  massacres  that  shadowed  the  Crusades, 
and  to  fill  the  economic  gap  in  a  country  consisting  only  of 
nobles  and  peasants.  Hither  in  the  twelfth  century  they  car- 
ried their  Old  German  language,  now  known  as  Yiddish,  and 
here,  under  the  autonomy  of  the  Kahal  and  the  Council  of  the 
Four  Lands,  a  Jewish  population  greater  than  the  population 
of  England  in  the  days  of  Elizabeth  has  lived  for  centuries 
under  its  own  culture  and  institutions.  Not,  indeed,  without 
exactions,  frictions  and  persecutions,  for  the  nobility,  high  or 
low,  the  middle  classes,  the  clergy  and  the  peasantry  of  this 
unpractical  country  were  united  only  by  their  opposition  to 
the  Jew,  but  still  with  comparative  content.  The  history  of 
modern  Jewry  may  almost  be  said  to  be  that  of  Polish  Jewry, 
for  the  Pale  was  only  the  share  of  old  Poland  that  fell  to  Russia 
at  the  trisection,  and  into  Russia  proper  the  Jew  was  never 
allowed  to  penetrate,  save  under  rare  circumstances. 

"  By  the  beginning  of  the  fourteenth  century,"  writes  the 
historian  Dubnow,  "  Polish  Jewry  had  become  a  big  economic 
and  social  factor  with  which  the  State  was  bound  to  reckon. 
It  was  now  destined  to  become  also  an  independent  spiritual 
entity,  having  stood  for  400  years  under  the  tutelage  of  the 
Jewish  centre  in  Germany." 

So  assimilated  biologically  did  the  Jews  become  to  their 
fellow-citizens  in  the  course  of  this  long  symbiosis,  that  Sir 
Stuart  Samuel  found  it  "  impossible  to  distinguish  between  the 
type  of  Jew  prevailing  in  the  Vilna-Pinsk  district  and  that  of 
the  ordinary  Russian  or  Tartar  inhabitants."  And  although 
their  life  was  always  shadowed  by  blood-accusations  and  mas- 
sacres, the  Polish  Jews  developed  a  love  of  Poland,  and  a 
patriotism  quite  as  keen  as  that  of  the  Poritz,  the  nobleman 
who  thought  Jewish  blood  too  vile  to  be  mixed  with  his  even  in 
battle.  At  all  the  great  crises  of  Polish  history  Jews  fought 
side  by  side  with  Poles.  When  in  the  seventeenth  century  the 
Ukrainians,  aided  by  the  Cossacks,  overran  Poland,  with  every 
Polish  priest  hung  up  at  the  high  altar  were  hung  a  dog  and  a 
Jew.  "  Freedom  shrieked  when  Kosciuszko  fell,"  says  Byron. 
But  when  Kosciuszko  fell,  a  regiment  of  Jewish  volunteers  under 
the  famous  Yoselevitch  covered  with  their  bodies  the  road  to 
Warsaw.     In  the  unsuccessful  rising  against  Russia  in  1830 

313 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

another  Jewish  regiment  took  part;  called,  from  their  long 
beards,  the  Beardlings.  And  in  the  last  revolt  against  Russia 
in  1863  the  Jews  of  Warsaw  on  the  solemn  feast  of  the  New 
Year  prayed  in  synagogue  for  the  Polish  cause  and  sang  the 
Polish  hymn :  "  It  is  not  yet  over  with  Poland."  The  Poles 
at  that  time  issued  a  proclamation  to  the  Jews,  saying:  "And 
it  shall  come  to  pass,  when,  with  God's  help,  we  shall  free  our 
country  from  the  tyranny  of  Russia,  we  shall  enjoy  in  common 
the  fruits  of  peace.  You  and  your  children  shall  be  in  unre- 
stricted possession  of  all  civil  rights.  For  the  Government  of 
the  People  will  not  inquire  into  faith  and  religion,  but  solely 
into  the  place  of  birth." 

Now,  after  fifty-seven  years,  Poland  is  free  from  the  tyranny 
of  Russia  and  we  see  how  she  keeps  her  word.  It  is  true  that  a 
Polish  Professor  at  Cracow  complains  that  during  the  recent 
war  the  Jews  of  Germany  and  Austrian  Poland  showed  "  an 
unhesitating  and  absolute  loyalty  to  Germany  and  Austria  " 
while  the  Poles  were  in  sullen  opposition.  But  in  the  half- 
century  since  the  very  name  of  Poland  was  blotted  out,  it  can- 
not be  expected  that  the  Jews,  born  under  the  German  and 
Austrian  Governments,  many  of  them  of  parents  to  whom 
Polish  government  was  equally  unknown,  should  have  imbibed 
that  Polish  patriotism  which  the  Polish  children  proper  sucked 
in  secretly  from  their  elders.  With  the  Jew,  as  with  any  other 
immigrant,  patriotism  —  in  the  first  generation  at  least  — 
cannot  be  racial  but  is  the  result  of  an  intelligent  co-operation 
with  the  good  of  the  State  which  shelters  him,  and  I  know  not 
why  the  herd-instinct  of  the  animal  should  be  preferred  to  the 
conscious  choice  of  human  will  and  reason,  as  for  instance  in 
those  Germans  who  emigrated  to  America  to  escape  the  atmos- 
phere of  militarism. 

"  Seek  the  peace  of  the  city  where  you  are  carried  away 
captive  "  has  always  been  the  Jewish  doctrine,  and  already  at 
the  moment  of  writing  the  Polish  Jews  are  at  their  old  business 
of  fasting  and  prayer  on  behalf  of  Polish  victory,  and  are 
issuing  patriotic  appeals  to  stand  by  Poland  in  her  hour  of 
crisis. 

Another  analogous  allegation  of  the  Poles  in  condonation  of 
their  outrages  is  that  they  got  on  very  will  with  the  old  Polish 
Jews  —  the  Polackvm  —  but  that  since  the  Russian  Jews  were 
driven  out  of  many  Russian  towns  in  the  'eighties,  the  westward 
stream  of  immigration  into  Russian  Poland  has  poured  in  on 
them  a  new  class  of  Jews  —  the  Litvakim  —  who  brought  with 

314 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

them  no  feeling  for  the  Polish  irredenta.  This  may  be  true  — 
indeed  the  persistent  hostility  of  Polackim  and  Litvakim  in  the 
London  Ghetto  of  to-day  argues  that  the  old  Polish  Jews 
resented  the  newcomers  as  much  as  the  Polish  Christians  did  — 
but  in  general  the  Polish  peasantry,  when  left  unpoisoned  by 
propaganda,  are  on  the  friendliest  terms  with  the  Jews,  who, 
for  their  part,  soon  grow  to  love  Poland.  And  even  if  the 
Russian  Jews  brought  with  them  on  arrival  a  Russian  atmos- 
phere, they  also  brought  with  them  considerable  benefits  to 
Polish  trade.  Warsaw,  which  received  the  richest  contingent, 
began  to  blossom  out  with  Polish-Russian  enterprises.  But 
neither  the  Polish  sentiments  of  the  older  Polish  Jewry  nor  the 
material  boons  of  the  new,  avail  to  abate  the  anti-Jewish  boy- 
cott which  is  reducing  the  Jewish  masses  to  despair,  or  the 
graver  persecutions  by  which  the  Poles,  with  complete  ignor- 
ance of  economic  law,  propose  to  drive  out  the  three  million 
Jews  embedded  in  their  State  by  the  accidents  of  history. 
With  a  reckless  levity  that  is  rebuked  even  by  their  own  sym- 
pathiser, Captain  Wright,  of  the  British  Commission  to 
Poland,  they  suppose  that  so  ancient  and  all-ramifying  a  con- 
nection can  be  slit  asunder  as  easily  as  Alexander  slit  the 
Gordian  knot. 

Despite  the  Minority  Treaty,  by  their  Sunday  Closing  Law 
they  have  reduced  the  working  da}\s  of  the  Jew  to  one  less  than 
their  own,  and  by  their  Aliens'  Law  have  already  disfranchised 
200,000  Jews  who  did  not  register  as  Poles  when  Poland  was 
yet  a  province  of  Russia !  It  throws  an  interesting  light  on 
this  latter  grievance  that  when  Paris  Jews  originally  hailing 
from  Poland  tried  to  register  in  Paris  as  Poles,  the  Polish 
bureaus  refused  to  grant  them  certificates  and  allowed  them  to 
be  stigmatised  or  interned  as  Germans !  Of  course,  when,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  Poles  were  taking  a  census  of  East  Galicia, 
where  the  Ukrainians  outnumbered  them  by  350,000,  they 
insisted  on  counting  all  the  660,000  Jews  as  Poles,  and 
interned  hundreds  who  refused  the  label.  These  statistical 
juggleries  go  far  to  confirm  the  claim  of  Jews  to  constitute  a 
separate  nationality  in  lands  of  mixed  population  where  they! 
are  densely  represented.  But  the  present  boycott  of  the  Jews 
in  Poland  is  not  due  to  their  national  claim,  but  to  their  refusal 
at  Warsaw  in  1912  to  elect  an  anti-Semitic  member  to  the 
Duma.  They  held  the  voting  power  and  could  have  returned  a 
Jew,  yet  they  were  menaced  with  massacre  unless  they  returned 
the  notorious  Dmowski.     I  remember  being  consulted  on  this 

315 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

point  and  advising,  subject  to  my  ignorance  of  local  conditions, 
that  it  was  humiliating  enough  not  to  be  represented  by  a 
Jewish  member,  but  that  to  vote  for  an  anti-Semite  would  be 
fatal  to  their  self-respect  and  that  the  risks  must  be  taken. 
The  Jews  of  Warsaw  accordingly  returned  the  only  candidate 
who  would  pledge  himself  not  to  support  an  anti-Semitic  policy, 
but  although  this  was  a  Pole  and  a  Roman  Catholic,  the 
defeated  Dmowski  devoted  himself  henceforward  to  a  campaign 
of  persecution.  And  as  if  his  hapless  country  had  not  enough 
enemies  on  her  borders  and  enough  internal  problems  to  con- 
front, she  has  saddled  herself  with  this  one-sided  civil  war,  for 
the  boycott  is  a  form  of  quarrel  which  it  takes  only  one  to  make. 

The  war  gave  the  Poles  the  opportunity  of  more  drastic 
revenge.  When  the  Russians  invaded  Galicia  the  Poles 
denounced  the  Jews  as  pro-Germans,  hostile  to  the  conquerors. 
When  the  Austrians  recaptured  a  town,  the  Poles  denounced 
the  Jews  as  pro-Russians.  What  wonder  if  215  pogroms  were 
reported  from  Poland ! 

These,  of  course,  were  denied.  Sazonoff  denied  them  for 
Russia,  which  was  still  responsible  for  Poland.  And  they  were 
denied  by  England,  which  considered  herself  responsible  for 
Russia.  All  who  tried  to  prove  them  were  accused  of  inventing 
slanders  against  Russia  to  weaken  the  Allies. 

Well  do  I  remember  the  difficulty  of  telling  the  truth  about 
Russia  in  those  days.      Russia  was  then  a  saintly  Steam  Roller. 

And  now  when  we  are  told  that  the  later  pogroms  have  also 
had  no  existence,  one  cannot  help  suspecting  so  strange  a 
coincidence.  Unfortunately  even  Captain  Wright's  report 
leaves  the  new  Poland  stained  with  streams  of  innocent  Jewish 
blood. 

At  the  Peace  Conference  in  1815  Alexander  of  Russia  pro- 
posed the  restoration  and  reunion  of  Poland,  and  he  had  almost 
persuaded  Prussia  to  agree  to  it.  But  France  and  England 
smashed  up  his  plan.  In  1916  these  same  two  Powers  were 
secretly  leagued  with  Russia  to  hand  over  to  her  even  German 
and  Austrian  Poland.  To-day  these  friends  of  nationality  — 
more  especially  France,  which,  crazed  by  its  war-losses  and  its 
financial  instability,  has  egged  on  Poland  to  new  disaster  — 
desire  a  Poland  as  large  as  possible  as  a  buffer  to  keep  Ger- 
many and  Russia  apart.  It  has  been  awkward  for  them  that 
the  most  important  creation  of  the  Paris  Conference  —  that 
Conference  which  was  to  make  the  world  safe  for  democracy 
and  to  protect  righteousness  and  small  peoples  —  should  have 

316 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

shown  itself  more  barbarous  than  the  countries  out  of  which 
it  has  been  pieced  together  again. 

"  Jews  must  get  away  from  Poland,"  reports  a  recent  Ameri- 
can visitor.  And  as  a  matter  of  fact  they  are  leaving  to  the 
tune  of  two  thousand  a  week,  and  the  Polish  authorities  tell  us 
a  quarter  of  a  million  have  applied  for  passports.  But  three 
millions  are  a  tough  number  to  emigrate,  and  even  if  it  is  true 
that  the  Poles  are  now  developing  commercial  habits,  and  that 
the  Jews  are  replaceable,  this  critical  moment  of  economic 
re-birth  is  hardly  the  moment  to  replace  them.  Not  in  emi- 
gration but  in  co-operation  lies  the  solution  of  the  Polish- 
Jewish  problem.  The  New  Poland  cannot  do  without  her  Jews, 
whose  international  network  of  business  relationships  is 
Poland's  only  hope.  It  is  a  question  if  even  with  the  Jews  she 
can  keep  her  head  above  water.  In  1914-15,  when  the  Russians 
invaded  Galicia  and  prohibited  Jewish  commerce  there,  the 
population  nearly  died  of  starvation.  It  is  strange  that 
Poland  should  fail  to  understand  that  an  industrious  popula- 
tion is  a  greater  treasure  than  gold  mines.  A  shrewd  Polish 
Jew  reassured  me  as  to  the  danger  of  gigantic  pogroms,  on 
the  ground  that  however  the  Poles  might  bluster  they  were  too 
inefficient  to  do  anything  thoroughly  or  on  a  grand  scale.  It 
would  seem  that  even  for  pogroms  they  would  need  Jewish 
assistance.  On  this  point  the  warning  of  the  Christian  member 
of  the  Polish  Commission  is  still  graver  than  Sir  Stuart 
Samuel's  !  "  A  race  planted  in  Poland  a  thousand  years,  how- 
ever inconvenient,  cannot  be  eradicated  without  a  convulsion 
that  would  be  almost  fatal." 


Ill 

Sensible  as  is  this  admonition  of  Captain  Peter  Wright's,  and 
laudable  as  is  the  study  he  has  with  abnormal  conscientiousness 
given  to  the  Polish-Jewish  problem  —  he  has  even  shamefacedly 
read  German  books  —  his  report  throws  more  light  upon  his 
own  psychology  than  on  that  of  the  Polish  Jews,  and  indirectly 
illumines  the  whole  Jewish  problem.  For  it  reveals  that  at 
bottom  Christendom  feels  that  the  Jew  has  no  right  to  exist! 
And  the  Jew,  with  his  usual  assimilativeness  feels  this  too,  and 
apologises  for  being  on  the  planet,  much  as  Captain  Peter 
Wright  apologises  for  reading  German  books. 

In  1851,  Mr.  Punch  was  righteously  indignant  with  the 
Austrian  Jews  because,  according  to  a  Viennese  correspondent 

317 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

of  the  Jcrcish  Chronicle,  they  would  have  nothing  to  do  with  the 
Austrian  Loan  until  they  had  received  the  Government's  assur- 
ance that  they  would  be  left  in  possession  of  their  liberties. 
That  they  should  thus  provide  "  halters  for  the  patriots  of 
Hungary,"  on  condition  of  being  left  free  themselves,  seemed 
monstrous  to  Mr.  Punch,  who,  in  fact,  proposed  the  very  next 
week  that  in  recognition  of  the  Sultan's  services  in  saving 
Kossuth  from  Francis  Joseph,  a  British  three-decker  should  be 
presented  by  national  subscription  to  the  gallant  Abdul-Medjid, 
and  should  sail  up  the  Bosphorus,  manned  for  the  nonce  by 
British  tars. 

It  never  occurred  to  Mr.  Punch  that  the  liberties  of  the  Jews 
were  as  sacred  as  those  of  the  Hungarians,  and  that  they  had  a 
right  to  defend  them  by  any  legitimate  means.  We  have  seen 
from  the  Debates  in  the  House  of  Lords  and  the  asperous  com- 
ments in  sundry  journals,  that  the  acquisition  of  Palestine  by 
the  Jews  seems  almost  as  monstrous  to  Christendom  as  their 
continuing  to  live  in  countries  not  their  own:  In  the  same 
spirit  Captain  Wright  is  far  more  concerned  for  the  persecut- 
ing Poles  than  for  the  Jews,  whose  grievances  he  was  sent  out 
to  investigate.  Indeed  it  would  seem  that  it  is  the  Poles  who 
have  the  grievance  in  the  fact  that  Jews  dare  to  breathe  the 
same  air.  Captain  Wright  resembles  the  legendary  little  girl 
who,  when  it  was  sought  to  move  her  religious  emotions  by  a 
picture  of  Christian  martyrdom,  commiserated  with  the  one 
poor  lion  who  was  without  a  Christian.  To  illustrate  how  the 
poor  Poles  are  put  upon.  Captain  Wright  insinuates  that 
Englishmen  should  try  to  imagine  how  they  would  feel  if,  in 
London  as  in  Warsaw,  every  third  person  was  a  Jew ;  if,  more- 
over, the  bulk  of  these  Jews  wore  a  costume,  adopted  a  style  of 
hairdressing,  and  spoke  a  dialect  that  were  not  English,  added 
to  their  eccentricity  by  belonging  to  that  queer  sect  of  Judaism, 
the  Chass'uTim,  and  refused  to  declare  themselves  of  British 
nationality  even  to  become  field-officers.  In  short,  the  situation 
of  a  peculiar  race  slowly  aggregated  and  niched  for  a  thousand 
years  amid  another  people,  and  blent  inextricably  with  its  life 
for  mutual  advantage,  is  compared  to  the  situation  that  would 
arise  were  a  crude  alien  mass  to  pour  suddenly  into  England. 
The  Jews  have  proved  their  utility  to  Poland  or  they  would  not 
be  there,  and  the  sudden  demand  for  their  expulsion  is  of  a 
mediaeval  barbarity  that  no  comparisons  can  make  less  mal- 
odorous. 

Captain  Wright  labours  to  prove  the  Jews  of  Poland  neither 

318 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  European  "  nor  "  modern,"  as  if  that  had  anything  to  do 
with  the  question,  or  as  if  the  Polish  peasantry  among  whom 
they  live  and  by  whom  their  beards  are  plucked  off,  offered  any 
more  congenial  society  for  a  British  officer  and  gentleman. 
Captain  Wright  must  have  a  very  imperfect  knowledge  of  the 
races  "  modern  Europe  "  harbours  in  its  bosom,  if  he  is  so  over- 
whelmed by  the  primitiveness  of  the  Polish  Jewry.  The  very 
sect  of  Chassidim  before  which  he  recoils  as  before  some  fan- 
tastic creation  of  Lewis  Carroll,  has  just  produced  the  boy 
chess-prodigy,  Samuel  Rzeschewski.  It  was  from  the  Polish 
Jewry  that  have  come  Rubinstein  and  half-a-dozen  musicians 
hardly  less  world-famous  than  Paderewski  himself,  and  Heaven 
knows  how  many  of  such  geniuses  have  been  massacred  off. 
The  fact  is,  that  just  as  anxious  as  the  Poles  now  are  to  go 
into  business,  are  the  Jews  to  get  out  of  it,  to  go  into  art,  the 
professions,  and  agriculture.  Their  very  demand  for  schools 
of  their  own  is  merely  an  expression  of  their  desire  to  transform 
and  raise  themselves  to  a  higher  moral  level,  to  uplift  them- 
selves and  their  common  country.  The  notion  that  they  shirk 
physical  work  is  calumnious.  Eastern  Europe  is  a-swarm  with 
a  despairing  young  Jewry  longing  to  turn  its  hand  to  any- 
thing. Witness  the  Lithuanian  Jews,  who,  driven  out  of  the 
towns  by  the  German  invaders,  found  themselves  in  the  deserted 
villages,  and  set  to  work  upon  the  fields,  even  old  Rabbis  taking 
part  in  the  novel  labour. 

Captain  Wright  tells  us  that  the  Jewish  masses  of  Poland 
are  "  unfit  for  the  modern  economic  world."  The  statement 
may  be  commended  to  the  fomenters  of  "  the  legend  of  the  Con- 
quering Jew."  But  if  it  is  correct,  then  why  do  the  Polish 
rage?  The  processes  of  economics  will  soon  eliminate  these 
undesirables.  Is  it  necessary  to  precipitate  their  death  or 
departure? 

IV 

Assuming  that  the  Jews  of  Poland  will  neither  be  destroyed 
nor  emigrated  to  any  considerable  extent,  we  may  expect  them 
to  continue  their  demand  for  recognition  as  a  national  minority, 
no  less  than  the  Lithuanians  and  Ukrainians  who  are  equally 
condemned  to  live  under  the  new  Polish  Republic.  (One  won- 
ders, by  the  way,  whether  Captain  Wright  recognises  the  mur- 
derous breed  of  the  Ukraine  as  "  European  "  or  "  modern."  ) 
The  case  of  the  Jews  of  Poland  is  not  therefore  exceptional, 

319 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

nor  is  there  anything  in  this  demand  of  theirs  to  make  either  the 
Polish  Christians  or  the  British  and  American  Hebrews  fulmi- 
nate. In  Czecho-Slovakia,  Lithuania,  and  elsewhere,  the  prin- 
ciple of  a  national  minority  has  already  been  conceded. 

I  have  in  a  previous  article  dealt  briefly  with  the  pros  and 
cons  of  this  principle,  and  need  only  add  here  that  nations  have 
not  always  been  so  homogeneous  and  uni-racial  as  the  modern 
European  ideal  seems  to  demand.  Austria  did  not  do  so  badly 
by  its  motley  ingredients;  in  the  "reactionary"  Ottoman 
Empire  other  creeds  are  still  allowed  to  live  under  the  system 
of  Millets,  and  in  the  darkest  ages  of  Christendom  the  right  of 
the  Jew  to  live  his  own  life,  though  he  was  implanted  in  an 
alien  State,  was  never  disputed,  for  the  Christian  Emperors 
followed  the  old  Roman  law  by  which  Judaism  was  a  "  rcllgio 
licita,"  carrying  with  it  a  certain  measure  of  internal  auton- 
umv.  But  to-day  patriotism  seems  inconceivable  apart  from 
racial  and  national  uniformity.  Switzerland  proves  the 
assumption  nonsensical.  Union,  not  uniformity,  is  strength. 
There  is  no  reason  why  several  peoples  should  not  combine  on 
economic  grounds  to  run  a  territory,  each  submitting  to  gen- 
eral laws  for  common  State  purposes,  while  at  the  same  time 
pursuing  a  cultural  autonomy  of  its  own.  Such  a  union  of 
hearts  in  fact  exists  in  Great  Britain  and  Wales,  and  the  fact 
that  in  many  European  countries  the  constituents  are  inter- 
fused, instead  of  being  more  or  less  isolated  geographically, 
makes  still  more  for  a  common  patriotism.  As  the  wise  declar- 
ation of  the  Lithuanian  Diet  of  July  23rd,  1920,  runs:  "  One 
of  the  most  important  political  questions  of  Lithuania  is  that 
of  the  creation  of  conditions  which  will  allow  the  national  min- 
orities, while  taking  their  full  share  in  the  building  up  of  the 
State  and  displaying  full  civic  loyalty,  to  create  their  own 
national  culture.  This  principle  was  proclaimed  at  the  time 
of  the  foundation  of  the  State,  and  is  incorporated  in  various 
laws  and  declarations." 

Such  a  group-system  is  practically  a  league  of  nations  in 
microcosm.  This  method  is,  moreover,  as  already  shown,  the 
best  way  of  protecting  minorities,  particularly  while  the  real 
League  of  Nations  remains  so  shadowy.  Even  were  the  League 
functioning  solidly,  its  absurd  rule  that  decisions  must  be  unan- 
imous, protects  —  so  far  as  I  can  see  —  a  mixed  State  from 
interference,  not  its  minorities  from  persecution.  For  Poland, 
being  a  member  of  the  League  of  Nations,  could  always  nega- 
tive any  measure  against  itself.      As  worked  out  in  the  Springer 

320 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

system,  the  recognition  of  a  national  minority  merely  means  its 
right  to  run  its  own  schools,  charities  and  places  of  worship 
by  a  proportionate  grant  from  the  common  taxes,  a  liaison 
Minister  between  the  State  and  the  nationality,  and  a  pro- 
portional number  of  representatives  in  a  parliament  elected  not 
by  districts  but  by  races. 

Because  the  Jews  are  so  dense  in  Poland,  the  Poles  draw  the 
deduction  that  they  should  be  expelled.  What  vicious  logic ! 
The  true  deduction  is,  that  they  have  a  millennial  right  to  a 
share  in  the  soil  and  to  their  own  peculiar  existence.  Indeed, 
but  for  the  preoccupation  of  the  Jews  with  Palestine  and  of 
the  Gentiles  with  Poland,  a  definite  territorial  claim  might  have 
been  made  for  an  "  ethnographic  Judaea."  Anyhow,  under  a 
proportional  representative  system  they  would,  if  they  consti- 
tute as  is  claimed,  14  per  cent,  of  the  population,  have  a  right 
to  fifty  or  sixty  of  the  400  or  so  seats  in  the  Diet.  Actually 
they  began  with  only  nine,  which  have  now  increased  to  eleven. 
And,  as  I  have  already  pointed  out,  by  gerrymandering  the 
constituencies  and  throwing  in  the  big  Jewish  towns  with  rural 
parishes,  the  Poles  have  almost  neutralised  Jewish  political 
power.  These  eleven  deputies  have  not  even  been  able  to  bring 
forward  a  resolution  against  the  pogroms  because  that  requires 
fifteen  signatures,  and  even  half-a-dozen  Socialists  cannot  be 
found  to  help  them.  Indeed,  the  Polish  Socialists  and  the 
whole  Polish  intelligentsia  —  in  such  sad  contrast  with  the 
Russian  intellectuals  and  rebels  under  Czarims  —  are  the  most 
virulent  anti-Semites ;  a  fact  which  serves  to  explain  the  para- 
dox that  they  were  also  the  most  fiery  advocates  of  the  advance 
on  Russia,  for  anti-Semitism  is  always  the  obverse  of  Jingoism. 
We  thus  see  the  comparative  worthlessness  of  political  equality 
as  an  instrument  of  self-defence  without  special  nationality 
rights.  With  absolute  equality  on  paper,  there  are  still  parts 
of  Poland  where  no  Jew  may  live. 

But  the  main  reason  why  modern  self-respecting  Jews  —  and 
the  Polish  Jews  we  suddenly  perceive  to  be  modern  after  all  — 
will  not  masquerade  under  other  national  colours,  is  that  the 
kaleidoscopic  changes  of  the  war  have  reduced  the  practice  to 
absurdity.  It  was  already  ridiculous  enough  that  in  the  Aus- 
trian census  the  Jew  was  compelled  to  declare  himself  Pole,  Ger- 
man, Magyar,  Ruthenian  or  Czech.  Now  that  Austria  is 
broken  up,  he  is  expected  to  share  the  nationality  of  the  domi- 
nant race  in  his  particular  fragment,  irrespective  of  his  former 
registration.     "  La  France,  c'est  ma  troisieme  patrie,"  cries  a 

321 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Jew  in  a  French  play.  A  Jew  of  Kieff,  which  has  been  taken 
and  retaken  seventeen  times,  would  have  had  to  be  ringing  the 
changes  on  Russian,  Ukrainian,  Pole,  (not  to  mention  Bolshe- 
vist and  anti-Bolshevist)  about  once  a  month.  Only  a  quick- 
change  patriot  could  have  kept  pace  with  the  permutations. 
The  Jew  in  any  city  wrangled  over  by  rival  elements  was  thus 
justified  by  prudence  as  well  as  by  humour  in  remaining  neutral 
and  just  a  Jew.  When,  for  example,  the  fight  for  Lemberg 
was  raging  for  days  between  the  Poles  and  the  Ukrainians,  with 
part  of  the  city  in  the  hands  of  one  combatant  and  part  in  the 
hands  of  another,  the  Jews  of  some  streets  would  on  the  rival 
theory  be  Poles  and  of  other  streets  Ukrainians,  and  if  you 
crossed  the  road  or  called  on  your  cousin  in  another  quarter, 
you  would  change  your  nationality.  Had  Germany  won  the 
war,  the  Lembergers  would  all  have  been  Austrians  again.  I 
have  heard  of  a  case  in  the  war  where  the  Jews  would  have  thus 
changed  their  nationality  four  or  five  times. 

No,  the  Jews  of  Poland  must  for  the  present  remain  what 
they  always  were  in  Poland  —  a  peculiar  nationality.  The 
situation  of  a  small  and  recently  immigrated  minority  of  a 
few  hundred  thousands  like  the  Jews  of  England  offers  no 
analogy  to  that  of  a  long-settled  group  counted  by  millions,  nor 
is  the  policy  suitable  for  the  one  situation  suitable  for  the  other. 
And  the  Poles  must  abandon  their  fanatical  conception  of  the 
uni-racial  State.  The  crude  homogeneous  form  of  nationality, 
denounced  by  that  great  Roman  Catholic,  Lord  Acton,  is  indeed 
hardly  compatible  with  the  religion  Poland  holds  in  common 
with  other  European  countries ;  it  is  entirely  inconsistent  with 
a  world  bent  on  a  League  of  Peoples.  I  can  well  understand 
the  patriotic  passion,  which,  embittered  by  the  long  pressure  of 
alien  elements  from  above,  chafes  to  find,  on  its  release,  alien 
elements  embedded  in  its  very  structure.  But  these  do  not 
press,  they  support,  and  to  deny  to  others  the  liberty  and  na- 
tional rights  one  claims  for  oneself  is  to  make  no  tactful  ap- 
pearance at  the  bar  of  history.  Nor  is  a  homogeneous  nation- 
ality  essential  to  freedom  or  self-expression.  All  that  is  neces- 
sary is  that  the  subsidiary  nationalities  shall  be  minorities. 
This  condition  is  not  fulfilled  in  Palestine  where  every  Jew  is 
swamped  by  seven  or  eight  non-Jews,  but  it  is  fulfilled  in  Po- 
land where  the  Poles  outnumber  all  other  peoples.  If  the  units 
of  its  minorities  are  treated  on  precisely  the  same  political 
basis  as  the  units  of  the  majority,  as  in  England,  then  their 
fusion  with  it  —  to  the  enrichment  of  the  common  nationality 

322 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

—  is  only  a  matter  of  time.  And  even  if  they  are  given  group- 
representation  and  their  cultural  life  is  lived  apart,  this  adul- 
terates the  majority  no  more  than  the  many  other  exotic  influ- 
ences which  are  constantly  infiltrating  into  all  modern  civilisa- 
tions, to  their  mutual  benefit. 

Polish  culture  will  therefore  either  absorb  Jewish,  as  English 
has  done  in  England  (where  the  contributions  of  a  Beacons- 
field  to  politics  and  literature,  a  Jessel  to  law,  or  a  Meldola  to 
science  have  been  incorporated  with  the  general  stock  of  val- 
ues), or  will  at  least  go  unendangered  by  it:  the  national  life 
becoming  in  any  case  the  fuller  for  the  diversity.  And  if  the 
Poles  at  their  proudest  epoch  found  it  both  easy  and  profitable 
to  live  with  the  Jews  at  a  time  when  these  latter  were  a  de- 
spised sociological  element,  how  much  much  readily  should  they 
adapt  themselves  to  symbiosis  with  a  race  now  universally  rec- 
ognised as  an  invaluable  asset  to  any  nation.  There  is  not  a 
Jew  among  all  the  Allied  peoples  who  did  not  begin  by  wishing 
the  new  Poland  the  maximum  possible  of  autonomy,  territory 
and  prosperity.  And  I  refuse  to  believe  that  the  Poles,  once 
they  have  sown  their  neo-national  wild  oats,  will  have  so  little 
fellow-feeling  for  the  most  tragic  and  the  longest-suffering  na- 
tionality in  history  that  they  will  try  to  stamp  it  out  as  the 
Prussians  tried  to  stamp  out  Prussian  Poland.  That  would 
be  an  irony  too  sad  for  laughter,  too  deep  for  tears.  No,  the 
near  future  must  and  will  see  Pole  and  Jew  working  hand  in 
hand  to  build  up  the  great  new  Poland,  which,  despite  its  initial 
imbecilities,  holds  not  only  the  sympathies  of  humanity,  but 
its  dreams  and  hopes. 


323 


THE  GOYIM 

{The   Venturer,  October,   1920) 

Beware  of  the  Goyim,  his  elders  told  Jacob, 

In  the  holy  peace  of  the  Sabbath  candles, 

They  drink  Jewish  blood : 

They  are  fiercer  than  flame, 

Or  than  cobras  acoil  for  the  spring. 

They  make  mock  of  our  God  and  our  Torah, 

They  rob  us  and  spit  on  us, 

They  slaughter  us  more  cruelly  than  the  Shochet  our  cattle. 

Go  not  outside  the  Ghetto. 

Should  your  footsteps  be  forced  to  their  haunts, 

Walk  warily,  never  forgetting 

They  are  Goyim, 

Foes  of  the  faith, 

Beings  of  darkness, 

Drunkards  and  bullies, 

Swift  with  the  fist  or  the  bludgeon, 

Many  in  species,  but  all 

Engendered  of  God  for  our  sins, 

And  many  and  strange  their  idolatries, 

But  the  worst  of  the  Goyim  are  the  creatures  called  Christians. 

In  the  comforting  gleam 
Of  the  two  Sabbath  candles 

The  little  boy  thrilled  with  an  exquisite  shudder 
At  the  words  of  his  elders. 

For  the  slums  that  enswathed  with  their  vileness  his  nest, 
Pullulated  with  Christians ; 
Easy  to  recognise 

By  the  stones  and  the  scoffs  of  their  young  at  his  passing, 
And  the  oaths  of  their  reeling  adults, 
And  the  black  eyes  they  gave  to  their  females 
On  Saturday  nights. 
Preparing  for  Sunday. 

Foul-tongued  and  ferocious  these  creatures,  the  worst  of  the 
Goyim. 

324 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

But  Jacob  grew  bigger, 

Outgrowing  the  Ghetto. 

He  laughed  at  his  elders 

With  their  cowering  fears  and  exclusive  old  customs 

And  mechanical  rites. 

He  worshipped  the  Gentiles, 

No  savage  inferiors  to  Israel, 

But  Plato  and  Virgil,  but  Shakespeare  and  Shelley, 

But  Bach  and  Beethoven, 

But  Michael  Angelo, 

Dreamers  and  seers  and  diviners, 

Shapers  of  Man,  not  a  tribe ; 

Builders  of  beauty. 

O  the  soul-shaking  roll  of  the  organ 
In  their  dim  cathedrals 
And  the  sacred  trance  of  the  spirit 
In  their  grass-grown  colleges  ! 

Poor  Ghetto's  fusty  lore 
And  the  drone  it  imagined  music 
And  the  blind-alley  it  called  the  cosmos. 

Hats  off  to  the  Goyim,  he  cried,  hats  off  e'en  in  Synagogue. 
Great  are  our  brethren  the  Goyim  and  the  greatest  of  all  are 
the  Christians. 

But  behold  him  to-day, 

Little  Jacob  once  more, 

Bowed  small  by  the  years  and  calamities, 

With  his  tragical  eyes, 

The  Jew's  haunted  eyes, 

That  have  seen  for  themselves, 

Seen  history  made 

On  the  old  Gentile  formula, 

Seen  the  slums  written  large 

In  the  red  fields  of  Europe, 

And  the  Goyim  blood-drunken, 

Reeling  and  cursing 

As  on  Saturday  night. 

Back,  back,  he  cries,  brethren. 

Back  to  the  Ghetto, 

To  our  God  of  Compassion, 

325 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

To  our  dream  of  Messiah, 
And  our  old  Sabbath  candles  ! 

For  the  others  are  Goyim, 
Who  despite  all  their  Platos, 
Their  Shakespeares  and  Shelleys, 

Their  Bachs  and  I3eethovens, 

Drink  human  blood. 

Not  only  ours  but  their  kinsmen's. 

Pitiless  fratricides, 

Beings  of  darkness, 

Foes  of  the  faith, 

Fiercer  than  cobras  acoil  for  the  spring: 

Many  in  species,  but  all 

Engendered  of  God  for  our  sins, 

And  many  and  strange  their  idolatries, 

But  the  worst  of  the  Goyim  arc  the  creatures  called  Christians. 


326 


THE  PEOPLE  OF  THE  ABYSS 

{The  Menorah  Journal,  New  York,  June,  1920) 

One  should  not  look  a  gift-horse  in  the  mouth,  and  Jakob 
Fingermann's  new  novel,  "  Menschen  im  Abgrund  "  (R.  Lowit 
Verlag,  Vienna  and  Berlin),  being  dedicated  to  the  writer,  might 
be  considered  immune  from  his  criticism.  Yet  since  the  young 
author  is  anxious  for  my  public  opinion,  I  cannot  well  deprive 
him  of  it.  And,  indeed,  his  revelations  are  of  the  gravest  and 
demand  the  light  of  day. 

When  Herr  Fingermann  first  informed  me  of  the  kind  of 
book  he  was  writing  —  the  tragedy  of  Polish  Jewry  during  the 
war  —  I  naturally  prepared  myself  for  expulsions  en  masse, 
anti-Semitic  persecutions,  whether  pogroms  or  pin-pricks,  eco- 
nomic boycotting,  accusations  of  profiteering,  charges  of 
treachery  from  each  and  all  of  the  invading  armies  in  turn,  in 
short,  something  like  that  imagined  report  of  Sir  Stuart  Sam- 
uel, which  the  British  Government  was  so  suspiciously  keeping 
back.  There  would  at  least  be  starvation  under  our  blockade. 
But  on  the  contrary,  although  of  course  the  poor  are  poorer 
than  ever,  from  beginning  to  end  one's  nostrils  sniff  with  de- 
lectation the  odours  of  roasted  geese,  delicious  white  rolls  come 
hot  from  the  oven,  the  samovar  steams,  champagne  fizzes,  and 
dance-music  trips  and  swings.  The  old  Chassidim  go  with 
beards  unplucked  and  unimperilled,  and  in  their  greasy  ragged 
caftans  pore  peacefully  the  long  night  through  over  their  mys- 
tic folios,  on  which  the  guttering  candles  drop  tallow,  while  at 
the  expense  of  an  opulent  member  of  the  brotherhood  they 
feast  royally  on  Wurst,  eggs,  and  a  bottle  of  Schnapps.  In 
the  wedding  festivities  the  bride  and  bridesmaids  (the  bride- 
groom is,  by  Polish  custom,  conspicuous  by  his  concealment) 
sit  in  white  array,  the  musicians  play  roisterously,  the  Mar- 
schalik  turns  his  merry  and  mercenary  rhymes.  Prosperous 
husbands  or  fathers  buy  sparkling  jewellery  for  their  women- 
kind.  On  the  Bourse  or  in  the  coffee-houses  there  is  brisk 
speculation ;  in  the  theatres  beautiful  ladies  in  airy  toilettes 
adorn  the  stage  or  the  stage-boxes ;  at  the  card-tables  the  play 
is  high  and  rolls  of  the  falling  rouble  pass  from  hand  to  hand. 

327 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

The  only  physical  persecution  of  the  Jews  in  the  whole  book  is 
a  raid  upon  their  quarter  —  to  bathe  them  for  fear  of  spotted 
typhus!  It  causes  one  of  the  few  plaints  we  hear  from  them 
of  the  hard  Jewish  lot  —  how  cheap  Jewish  blood  is  held,  or 
Jewish  dignity.  Nor,  although  it  is  a  war-book,  is  there  a  word 
directly  about  the  fighting.  And  yet  the  whole  story  is  one 
of  almost  unendurable  tragedy,  of  spiritual  degradation.  It  is 
the  story  of  the  people  of  the  abyss. 

It  will  be  seen  that  the  author  has  devised  a  ground-scheme 
of  no  ordinary  subtlety.  He  has  taken  Lublin,  a  Polish  town 
through  which,  except  for  the  unresisted  Austrian  occupa- 
tion, the  war  never  actually  passed,  though  regiments  were  drill- 
ing in  it  for  the  front.  And  though  Lublin  thus  remains  un- 
touched and  tranquil,  a  little  dead-alive  provincial  town  to 
which  only  its  Jews  give  animation,  yet  the  distant  war  reaches 
out  a  thousand  arms  to  strangle  all  that  is  decent  in  it.  Of 
the  purpose  of  the  war  we  hear  no  word ;  there  is  nothing  of 
the  glamorous  rhetoric  with  which  the  British  soul  enswathed 
it.  There  could  not  in  fact  be  a  more  terrific  indictment  of 
war  than  emanates  as  if  unconsciously  from  this  bland  and 
brutal  book.  For  although  not  even  an  enemy  aeroplane  hov- 
ers over  Lublin,  the  nervous  apprehension  that  its  abnormal  se- 
curity will  soon  be  at  an  end  drives  it  into  the  sensuous  satis- 
faction of  the  moment.  All  is  guzzling  and  swilling,  fraudu- 
lence  and  fornication.  We  have  the  sordid  effects  of  war  with- 
out even  its  redeeming  heroism. 

With  some  of  these  by-products  of  war  we  have  become  fa- 
miliar even  in  England  —  the  promiscuity  resulting  from  the 
absence  of  husbands,  the  lessened  regard  for  human  life.  But 
we  have  not  reached  the  shamelessness  of  these  almost  public 
orgies  in  theatre-boxes  or  restaurants,  though  we  may  have 
come  near  them.  And  though  doubtless  there  have  been  pecula- 
tion, food-smuggling,  and  falsification  of  passports,  we  have 
known  nothing  on  such  an  organised  basis  as  in  Poland,  where, 
according  to  our  author,  the  Austrian  officials,  dressed  in  their 
little  brief  authority,  have  the  time  of  their  lives  in  profiting 
by  their  opportunities,  and,  originally  men  of  honour,  go 
headlong  over  the  abyss  of  demoralisation. 

And  although  the  moral  pestilence  germinating  in  the  distant 
battlefields  rages  most  violently  in  the  Christian  quarters,  yet 
the  Jews  of  Lublin  do  not  escape  it,  partly  from  their  habitual 
assimilativeness,  but  mainly  from  the  peculiar  treatment  dealt 
out  to  them.     For  here  comes  in  the  real  persecution  of  Polish 

328 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Jewry  —  a  negative  rather  than  a  positive  persecution  —  a 
refusal  to  grant  to  them  any  of  the  concessions  or  licences  nec- 
essary to  their  livelihood.  And  if  Shylock  was  right  when  he 
urged : 

"  You  do  take  my  life 
When  you  do  take  the  means  whereby  I  live/' 

it  was  practically  a  massacre  of  Polish  Jewry.  And  though  the 
victims  could  escape  at  a  price,  that  did  but  constitute  a  moral 
massacre.  Sometimes  indeed,  in  their  wretched  greed  and 
baseness,  the  wealthy  send  their  own  wives  and  daughters  on 
the  criminal  quest  of  business  concessions ;  but  more  often  it  is 
a  case  of  sheer  necessity,  as  Folberg,  the  dandified  Jew,  ex- 
presses it  in  a  burst  of  sympathy.  "  The  Austrians  allow  no 
glass  of  beer  to  be  sold,  no  bit  of  bread  to  be  baked,  unless 
some  one  pays  for  the  concession.  And  how  does  one  get  this? 
The  ways  are  bitter.  In  these  little  towns  sit  military  men  and 
officials.  The  war  is  far  away,  they  live  like  in  Paradise,  and 
are  sated  with  gold  and  grub.  They  are  bored  and  their  belly 
is  full.  The  Jew  comes :  '  Give  me,  gracious  Herr,  the  scrap 
of  official  paper  so  that  I  may  carry  on  my  business.'  He  finds 
deaf  ears.  He  comes  a  second,  a  third,  a  fourth  time.  The 
surfeited  officer  laughs  him  to  the  door  and  waits  for  his  des- 
tined victim.  The  Jew  is  in  despair.  His  money  is  at  the  last 
rouble,  and  famine  peers  from  every  corner.  He  resists,  re- 
flects, seeks  some  outlet  —  all  in  vain.  See  how  the  Christian 
business  man,  without  any  trouble,  obtains  concessions  and 
contracts.  The  bread  in  the  house  is  dwindling  to  the  last 
crumb.  He  goes  yet  again  to  the  official :  '  Have  pity,  gra- 
cious Herr.'  '  Get  out!  You  Jews  want  to  eat  up  the  whole 
trade.  I  can  do  nothing  .  .  .  Oh,  by  the  way,  send  your 
daughter  here  to-morrow.  Perhaps  in  the  meantime  I  shall 
think  of  something  for  you.'  The  Jew  collapses  as  under  the 
blow  of  a  headsman.  He  knows  now  the  frightful  price.  He 
suffers,  sells  his  last  rag,  consumes  his  last  crust,  and  neverthe- 
less, one  night  a  Jewish  maiden  finds  herself  in  the  officer's  arms. 
Then  full  soon  the  concession  is  granted.  Bread  and  money 
stream  into  the  dishonoured  Jewish  home." 

No  wonder  another  Jew  in  the  book  complains  that  the  imme- 
morial foundations  of  Jewish  life  are  being  undermined.  In- 
deed, without  its  domestic  virtues  how  should  Jewry  stand? 
To  quote  Shylock  again: 

329 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

"  You  take  my  house  when  you  do  take  the  prop 
That  doth  sustain  my  house." 

One  after  another  the  personages  of  the  story  fall  over  the 
abyss  on  whose  brink  they  have  been  hovering.  And  all  this 
diseased  and  distorted  life  finds  its  inevitable  nemesis  —  the 
lights  go  out,  the  music  dies,  and  the  dancing;  perfumed  minxes 
perish  in  hospital,  young  soldiers  take  poison,  beautiful  women 
moan  insanely  for  their  slain  lovers,  conspirators  murder  of- 
ficials and  blow  out  their  own  brains  —  Lublin,  though  it  has  es- 
caped being  a  battlefield,  is  left  strewn  with  corpses  and  sui- 
cides. 

Obviously  not  a  cheerful  book,  nor  one  to  encourage  man- 
kind to  turn  away  from  the  League  of  Nations.  Even  a  Zion- 
ist gathering  in  the  Herzl  Club  brings  no  balm  to  the  wounded 
spirit  of  the  critical  observer,  though  a  thousand  Jews  jostle  to 
find  standing  room  when  the  great  Hebrew  writer  and  orator, 
Brandes  —  a  touch  of  historic  realism  this  —  comes  to  offer 
the  conventional  rhetoric.  As  the  editor  of  the  Morgenhlatt 
explains  cynically  to  an  impressed  spectator,  they  cannot  be 
really  awakened  from  their  apathy,  or  their  lust  of  gold  and 
gormandising;  they  come  as  to  a  dramatic  spectacle,  to  get  a 
cheap  sensation.  I  am  bound  to  say  my  own  observation  of 
many  popular  meetings  —  whether  Jewish  or  Christian  —  ad- 
dressed by  myself  does  not  differ  from  that  editor's.  One 
touch  of  verisimilitude  is,  however,  absent  from  this  account 
of  a  Zionist  meeting,  for  it  appears  to  begin  punctually. 

There  are  characters  in  this  grim  book  that  are  new  to  the  lit- 
erature of  the  Ghetto.  Its  leading  figure,  Lazarewitsch,  for 
example,  a  Chassid,  who  prays  in  phylacteries,  and  is  engaged 
in  great  speculations  with  the  rouble  and  undertakes  grandiose 
illegalities  to  help  the  Polish  revolutionaries,  has  yet  a  ro- 
mantic passion  for  his  pretty,  faithless  wife,  despite  her  modern 
fashionable  culture,  and  for  all  his  narrow  pietism  is  built  on 
big  lines,  which  compel  even  this  giddypate's  reluctant  admira- 
tion. It  is  not  a  character  that  I  have  myself  encountered,  nor 
has  the  author  succeeded  in  making  it  comprehensible,  any  more 
than  lie  has  succeeded  in  making  it  clear  whether  the  wife  is 
simply  a  minor  Messalina  or  is  really  actuated  by  the  desire 
to  have  a  child.  Possibly  we  are  to  understand  a  subtle  self- 
deception  in  accordance  with  the  doctrines  of  the  author's  fel- 
low-townsman, Freud.  Or  perhaps  writing  in  Vienna  in  days 
of  cold  and  hunger,  Mr.  Fingermann  has  not  quite  succeeded 

330 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

in  his  artistic  task.  His  forte,  indeed,  seems  to  be  less  in  char- 
acter-drawing or  in  construction  —  the  structure  of  the  book 
is  desultory  and  the  atmosphere  to  some  extent  broken  by  the 
intrusion  of  a  Polish  revolutionary  episode  —  than  in  descrip- 
tion. The  vividness  and  brevity  of  his  scenes  are  extraordi- 
nary, and  if  he  cannot  always  get  inside  his  personages,  his 
painting  of  outsides  is  not  easily  matched.  Whether  he  is 
showing  us  a  bearded  Jew  with  thumping  heart  and  false  pass- 
port slipping  a  thousand-rouble  note  into  the  gendarme's  hand, 
at  the  exit  from  the  railway  station ;  whether  we  are  sleighing 
through  the  snowy  streets,  past  the  grey  houses,  and  over 
rough,  dangerously-rutted  roads ;  whether  he  hales  us  into  the 
smoky  din  of  chaffering  cafes  or  into  the  slangy  society  of  gam- 
bling and  womanising  officers ;  whether  he  is  giving  us  welcome 
glimpses  of  the  humours  of  Yiddish  players  or  showing  us  angry 
speculators  quarrelling  over  their  joint  losses;  whether  he  is 
sketching  the  conscribed  shopkeeper  who  will  move  heaven  and 
earth  to  prove  he  is  too  sickly  for  the  front,  or  the  shrewd  busi- 
ness man  who  refuses  a  loan  to  an  apparently  rich  colleague  be- 
cause in  a  cold  room  he  sees  a  bead  of  perspiration  on  the 
would-be  borrower's  brow,  Herr  Fingermann  draws  in  a  few 
strokes  a  series  of  unforgettable  pictures. 

Even  the  revolutionary  episode,  disruptive  as  it  is  to  the  com- 
position, is  wonderfully  dramatic.  And,  like  a  true  artist, 
Herr  Fingermann  never  underlines.  You  have  to  perceive  for 
yourself  the  irony  of  the  universal  longing  of  the  Austrian  of- 
ficers and  functionaries  for  the  glories  and  gaieties  of  Vienna  — 
where  life  is  one  long  round  of  concerts  and  cabarets,  and  mil- 
lions are  made  over-night.  And  the  artist  similarly  desists 
from  rubbing  in  the  pathos  or  the  humour  of  the  Jewish  sol- 
diers' jubilation  when  their  eye  catches  the  headline  in  some 
trumpery  little  journal,  "Peace  negotiations  with  Russia." 
They  even  dash  off  to  fete  the  Peace !  A  true  touch  of  Jewish 
psychology,  that ! 

How  far  the  picture,  as  a  whole,  stands  in  true  proportion  or 
correspondence  with  the  realities  of  Polish-Jewish  life  during 
the  war,  or  how  far  the  young  novelist  has  been  carried  away 
by  righteous  indignation  —  and  the  book's  motto  from  Jere- 
miah provides  the  clue  to  his  mood  —  I  am  unable  to  say ;  "  the 
fog  of  war  "  having  reduced  the  mutual  knowledge  of  Europe 
to  that  of  the  Dark  Ages.  But  even  in  our  Austrian  Jere- 
miah's picture  the  gloom  is  not  utterly  unrelieved.  Stealing 
through  all  this  horror  and  ugliness,  like  a  delicate  and  exquisite 

331 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

music  heard  in  the  pauses  of  a  Witches'  Sabbath,  comes  the  in- 
terlude of  Brane,  the  poor  maiden  who  works  her  hands  to  the 
bone  at  the  factor}'  and  in  the  poverty-stricken  home  rather 
than  go  over  the  abyss  with  her  girl-companions,  and  literature 
has  few  scenes  more  touching  than  her  emotion  when  she  is 
wooed  by  an  honest  breadwinner.  That  is  an  episode  far  more 
moving  than  the  death  through  hunger  and  exhaustion  of  her 
little  brother  —  a  death  that  comes  much  too  suddenly  and  un- 
prepared to  be  convincing.  Rarely  touching,  too,  is  the  pic- 
ture of  the  happiness  of  her  humble,  one-roomed  menage,  with 
its  dripping  walls,  its  bed  and  its  sewing-machine ;  such  a  bar- 
gain at  three  roubles  a  month !  "  Life  is  beautiful,"  says  the 
little  journeyman  tailor.  "  Never  have  Brane  and  I  been  so 
well  off!" 

And  here  we  see  at  last  what  the  author  is  trying  by  contrast 
to  teach  us.  For  this  is  the  only  happiness  achieved  amid  all 
that  egotistic  and  esurient  crew,  unless  we  count  the  moment 
when  the  old  innkeeper  sings  the  Sabbath  Zemiroth  and  the 
young  Jewish  officer-guest  feels  that  the  simple  immemorial  rit- 
ual makes  a  core  of  peace  amid  the  madness  of  the  Gentiles  and 
their  war.  And  the  same  lesson  wafts  from  that  more  ironic 
episode  upon  which  the  story  closes.  The  poor  old  Chassidim 
sit  at  night  at  their  Seder-table ;  and  while  their  wealthy, 
broken-hearted  brother,  whose  adored  wife  has  gone  over  the 
abyss,  peers  in  like  a  lost  spirit  at  the  festal  lights  and  the 
quaint  Passover  dishes  and  wine-cups,  these  penniless  white- 
bearded  ancients  intone  with  a  yearning  rapture :  "  Next  year 
in  Jerusalem!  " 


332 


CONVERTED  MISSIONARIES 


Mr.  Leonard  Woolf,  the  presiding  genius  of  the  Fabian 
Society's  scheme  for  a  League  of  Nations,  having  started  a 
much-needed  International  Review  to  keep  us  informed  —  de- 
spite the  newspapers  —  of  what  was  going  on  abroad,  I  duly 
ordered  the  first  number  from  my  bookseller.  When  a  small 
boy  solemnly  delivered  at  my  rural  retreat  an  International  Re- 
view of  Missions,  I  was  divided  between  annoyance  and  amuse- 
ment. To  send  me  this  —  me  of  all  persons  in  the  world  —  to 
whom  missionaries  had  been  anathema  since  childhood ;  con- 
ceived as  a  sort  of  spiritual  spider  in  wait  for  the  Jewish  soul 
and  spinning  a  wicked  web  of  textual  sophistry  to  entangle  it! 
Indeed  maturer  acquaintance  with  missionary  methods,  in  which 
the  mistranslation  of  Isaiah  was  supplemented  by  material  lures, 
had  not  enhanced  my  respect.  These  Mrs.  Jellybys  —  it  ap- 
peared moreover  —  did  not  limit  their  attentions  to  the  race 
which,  having  produced  Jesus,  might  be  presumed  best  fitted  to 
interpret  him.  There  was  no  people,  however  limited  its  brain- 
power, or  however  great  and  ancient  its  civilisation,  but  was 
equally  the  target  of  their  theological  assaults. 

But  still  the  conversion  of  a  Jew  was  the  blue  ribbon  of  the 
profession.  No  wonder  that  Hebrew  converts  cost  an  average 
of  a  thousand  pounds  apiece,  and  that  an  effluvium  of  profiteer- 
ing hangs  over  both  converter  and  convert. 

II 

Then  there  was  the  missionary  who  came  to  our  village  dur- 
ing the  early  days  of  the  war  and  held  forth  in  the  Squire's 
garden  against  the  grabbing  ambitions  of  the  Germans,  with 
their  desperate  "  Drang  nach  Osten  "  and  their  immoral  designs 
against  the  British  Empire.  They  actually  aimed  at  the  oil 
wells  of  Mesopotamia,  and  the  monopoly  of  trade  with  Bagh- 
dad. They  had  a  gun-boat  plying  around  Aden  and  a  camou- 
flaged fort  in  Palestine.  This  man  hailed  from  Jerusalem,  and 
was  presumably  saturated  with  the  aroma  of  the  sacred  soil. 

333 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Lord  Salisbury's  famous  dictum  ran :  "  First  the  missionary, 
then  the  trader,  then  the  gun-boat,"  but  our  orator  seemed  an 
epitome  of  them  all. 

Being  unexpectedly  called  upon  to  move  a  vote  of  thanks  to 
the  lecturer,  I  blandly  advised  him  to  change  the  order  of  his 
remarks  in  future,  and  instead  of  winding  up  with  a  eulogy  of 
the  British  Empire,  to  begin  by  pointing  out  how  much  more 
advantageous  it  was  to  mankind  at  large  to  be  governed  by  the 
humanitarian  Briton  than  by  the  barbarous  Teuton;  otherwise 
his  address  sounded  as  if  Britain  was  in  mere  crude  competi- 
tion with  Germany  for  the  very  mountain-top  from  which  the 
devil  showed  Jesus  all  the  kingdoms  of  the  world. 

Ill 

Pondering  which  things,  I  opened  the  Jievicxc  of  Missions,  and 
turned  over  its  pages  in  ironic  expectation  of  a  record  of  ubi- 
quitous futility.  What  was  my  pleasant  disappointment  to 
find  that  it  was  as  much  concerned  with  the  League  of  Nations 
as  the  magazine  which  it  mistakenly  replaced,  and  to  come  upon 
passage  after  passage  instinct  with  the  question,  admirably 
summed  up  by  the  editor,  Mr.  J.  H.  Oldham,  "  whether  the  mis- 
sionary movement  if  it  is  to  live  in  the  new  world  must  not  take 
a  great  leap  forward  and  press  into  the  throbbing  heart  and 
centre  of  the  nation's  life!"  Mr.  J.  S.  B.  Brough,  in  a  paper 
on  "The  Eternal  Source  of  Missions,"  so  eloquent  and  candid 
that  it  is  a  grief  to  learn  that  he  has  just  died  of  the  conven- 
tional epidemic,  says :  "  The  general  life  of  the  average  pro- 
fessing Christian  does  not  move  men  by  its  self-sacrifice,  nor 
does  it  challenge  conventional  standards.  .  .  .  There  is  an  un- 
happy amount  of  bite  in  the  criticism  made  of  us  which  concen- 
trates on  our  lack  of  truth,  our  lack  of  love,  and  our  lack  of 
life.  We  are  held  to  be  out  of  touch  with  reality  in  respect  of 
God  or  man  :  we  .ire  seen  disastrously  wanting  in  true  fellowship 
among  ourselves  or  with  those  outside  our  borders.  .  .  .  We 
require  a  fresh  direction  of  impulse,  a  revised  scale  of  values; 
for  it  has  been  made  clear  to  us  that  our  normal  standards  dif- 
fer disastrously  from  those  of  God."  Mr.  E.  Shillito,  writing 
on  "  Missions  and  the  Man  of  191!)."  similarly  admits  that  "  the 
Christian  Church  has  often  turned  aside  from  its  calling,"  and 
asserts  that  "  the  hope  of  the  world  lies  ...  in  a  common- 
wealth of  nations."  "  The  man  of  1910  "  will  not  listen  to  the 
"  cowardly  "  doctrine  that  Christ's  teaching  is  "  meant  only  for 

834 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

individual  souls  and  not  for  nations  in  their  commerce  with  one 
another."  Dr.  Diffendorfer,  an  American  colleague,  sets  forth 
the  programme  of  "  A  Dominantly  Missionary  Church  "  that 
is  to  win  the  world  and  "  uncover  the  world's  great  needs,  not  in 
terms  of  theology  or  in  the  cant  phrases  of  the  classroom,  but 
in  the  concrete  language  of  everyday  life  that  all  people  under- 
stand." In  his  "  Unoccupied  Fields  at  the  Home  Base  "  Mr. 
Basil  Mathews  proclaims  that  after  "  the  unimaginable  ruin  of 
the  welter  of  war  "  we  are  at  the  turning-point  "  when  the  world 
will  receive  the  trend  of  civilisation  which  will  determine  whether 
international  and  interracial  relations  are  to  be  rooted  in  ri- 
valry, or  to  grow  from  co-operative  emulation  under  the  rule  of 
Christ." 

So  great  "  a  cloud  of  witnesses  "  puts  the  miracle  beyond 
question.  The  missionaries  have  been  converted  to  Christian- 
ity! 

IV 

And  not  only  under  the  immense  impact  of  the  war  have  they 
been  brought  to  see  where  the  duty  of  the  Church  lies  to-day, 
but  they  boldly  maintain  that  such  has  been  the  work  of  its  mis- 
sionaries in  the  past.  They  "  have  been  a  perpetual  protest 
against  any  claim  for  Christianity  that  falls  short  of  universal 
domination.  They  have  denied  by  their  witness  the  unjust 
claims  of  nationality."  True,  the  assertion  I  have  italicised  is 
only  an  example  of  that  "  law  of  missions  "  which  I  have  pointed 
out  in  my  little  book  on  "  Chosen  Peoples  "- —  the  tendency  to 
see  newly-conceived  purposes  as  retrospectively  in  action.  As 
a  matter  of  fact  national  rivalries  have  often  been  imported 
into  missionary  effort,  just  as  Christ  himself  has  been  uni- 
versally nationalised.  Still,  if  an  inaccurate,  it  is  a  noble  re- 
interpretation  of  Christian  missionary  effort,  an  inspiring  con- 
cept for  the  future,  a  recharging  of  a  decayed  battery,  a  linking 
of  the  Christian  with  the  larger  human  hope,  a  revised  reading 
that  redeems  "  Missions  "  from  the  flavour  of  crankiness  their 
official  organ  admits  to  be  associated  with  them.  With  such  a 
renewed  inspiration,  they  might  well  hope  to  enlist  the  sympa- 
thies of  more  than  the  invalids,  women,  and  children,  from  whom 
their  present  support  is  confessedly  drawn. 


335 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


My  satisfaction  is  not,  however,  untempered.  Doubts  in- 
trude. The  conversion  of  the  missionaries  is  somewhat  belated. 
The  war  is  over.  It  is  not  so  difficult  to  be  a  Christian  now. 
Unlike  the  devil  who  becomes  a  saint  when  he  is  sick,  the  mis- 
sionary appears  to  become  one  when  the  crisis  is  over.  Still, 
there  are  a  few  trifles  on  which  he  may  try  the  proverbial  zeal 
of  the  convert.  The  war  —  and  still  more  the  peace  —  has  left 
many  opportunities  for  the  imitatio  Christi.  I  shall  watch  in 
hope  and  charity,  if  not  in  faith. 

Moreover  the  missionary's  interests  still  appear  to  be  prac- 
tically limited  to  foreign  captures.  "  Unoccupied  Fields  at 
the  Home  Base  "  does  not,  as  one  might  imagine,  refer  to  the 
70  or  80  per  cent,  of  Englishmen  who,  we  are  told,  never  attend 
a  place  of  worship.  It  refers  only  to  the  minority  already 
saved  and  its  problem  is  how  to  stimulate  these  to  save  other 
souls  abroad.  But  why  the  immense  field  lying  open  to  them 
without  travelling  expenses  is  ignored,  is  left  a  Christian  mys- 
tery.     Surely  Christianity,  like  Charity,  should  begin  at  home. 

VI 

And  I  do  not  like  this  commandeering  for  Christianity  of 
that  ideal  of  a  brotherhood  of  nations  which  is  common  to  all 
good  men,  and  which  was  first  categorically  proclaimed  and 
prophesied  in  the  Old  Testament.  Still,  the  more  I  watch  the 
tragi-comed}'  of  the  Peace  Conferences,  the  clearer  becomes  the 
futility  of  politics  and  politicians.  For  to  achieve  what  Mr. 
Basil  Mathews  calls  "  the  reconstruction  of  a  new  and  worthy 
world-order  upon  the  shell-shattered  ruins  of  our  civilisation," 
there  must  be  a  burning  missionary  faith,  an  apostleship  ready 
for  all  sacrifice.  If  the  "  Missions  "  will  really  supply  this,  I 
shall  not  boggle  at  their  formula?,  knowing  that  "  The  Eternal 
Source  of  Missions  "  is  not  a  phonograph.  In  that  case  I  will 
gladly  haunt  Mrs.  Jellyby's  drawing-room,  enter  into  com- 
munion with  the  natives  of  Borrioboola-Gha,  and  even  put 
money  in  the  plate. 


336 


TWO  JOSEPHS  THAT  DREAMED 

I.  Joseph  Fels 
{Fortnightly  Review,  June,  1920.) 

I 

I  had  never  heard  of  Joseph  Fels  until  a  shining-eyed  little 
man  walked  into  my  office  unannounced  and  unheralded,  and  of- 
fered me  a  hundred  thousand  dollars.  It  was  in  Essex  Street, 
where  Dr.  Johnson  had  once  presided  over  Sam's  Club,  that  this 
miracle  occurred.  In  this  old-world  by-way  off  the  Thames,  in 
an  atmosphere  of  solicitors  and  sporting  papers,  the  Jewish 
Territorial  Organisation  (yclept  for  short,  Ito)  had  raised  the 
standard  of  the  Jewish  State,  and  the  visitor's  offer  was  meant 
as  a  contribution  to  the  sinews  of  war.  Unfortunately,  it  is 
not  only  the  propositions  of  Satan  that  have  stings  to  them. 
Even  angels,  whose  visits  are  so  few  and  far  between,  hedge 
their  gifts  with  conditions,  and  what  Mr.  Fels  wanted  was  that 
the  State  to  be  brought  into  being  should  be  established  on  a 
single-tax  basis. 

Sympathetically  disposed  as  I  was  towards  land-nationalisa- 
tion, and  still  more  towards  Ito  capitalisation,  I  was  unable  to 
pledge  the  organisation  to  the  Henry  Georgian  principle,  be- 
cause it  was  impossible  to  foresee  the  circumstances  and  condi- 
tions under  which  the  desired  tract  of  territory  would  become 
attainable  —  if,  indeed,  it  would  become  attainable  at  all  in  a 
world  ruled  by  unreason  and  the  sword.  In  the  motto  of  the 
old  Flemish  painter,  "  not  as  I  would,  but  as  I  can."  Our  first 
business  was  to  obtain  a  territory.  For  Fels  the  first  business 
was  to  single-tax  it.  One  could  not  know  him  for  a  day  with- 
out discovering  that  to  him  Henry  George  was  Moses,  and 
"  single-tax  "  all  the  law  and  the  prophets.  "  A  Calvinistic 
preacher,"  says  Hazlitt,  "  would  not  relinquish  a  single  point 
of  faith  to  be  the  Pope  of  Rome."  Fels  would  not  sanction 
private  property  in  land  to  be  the  President  of  the  United 
States ;  taxation  of  land  values  was  the  medicine  for  all  human 
ills,  though  when  I  once  bantered  him  upon  his  persuasion  that 
it  was  a  panacea  he  replied  with  a  humour  as  characteristic  as 
his  fervour :     "  I  don't  say  it  will  cure  in-growing  toe-nails." 

337 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

It  was  this  humour  that  made  him  bearable  oven  to  the  heathen 
who  sware  not  by  St.  George,  nor  held  the  single-tax  sacred. 
He  spoke  the  American  language  with  a  fund  of  rich  and  racy 
locutions  that  recalled  the  pungent  vitality  of  the  early  Mark 
Twain.  They  added  —  if  anything  could  —  to  the  radiation 
he  gave  of  absolute  sincerity,  and  were  the  joy  of  his  audiences, 
public  or  private.  "I  love  a  fanatic,"  said  Oscar  Straus  to 
me  after  an  hour  of  Joseph  Fels,  with  whom  he  disagreed  pro- 
foundly. But  Joseph  Fels  was  loved  in  despite  of  his  fanati- 
cism as  well  as  on  account  of  it. 


II 

Nor  did  his  fanaticism  prevent  his  co-operation  in  other 
causes,  though  it  prevented  his  absorption  in  them.  He  was  in- 
terested in  the  Woman  Question,  and  played  a  useful  part  in 
bailing  out  "  suffragettes,"  male  or  female.  lie  was  of  similar 
service  in  the  Tchaikowsky  and  other  troubles  in  Russia  —  in- 
deed, in  an  age  when  money  is  so  rarely  forthcoming  at  the  call 
of  the  spirit,  though  it  can  be  had  in  sackfuls  for  causes  of 
recognised  respectability,  Fels  filled  a  role  in  which  it  is  not  easy 
to  replace  him.  He  was  the  universal  provider,  the  financier 
of  the  unprofitable,  the  philanthropic  publicist,  the  handy-man 
of  the  social  revolution,  the  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  of  Bo- 
hemia. He  advertised  his  soap,  Fels-Naptha,  in  papers  chosen 
not  for  their  circulation  but  for  their  lack  of  it:  sweet  are  the 
uses  of  advertisement.  He  commissioned  a  single-tax  play; 
sculptures  were  dumped  in  his  drawing-room.  I  once  calcu- 
lated with  him  the  annual  income  necessary  for  rescuing  from 
the  toils  of  poverty  all  the  unrecognised  geniuses  of  the  day 
the  toll  was  not  alarming.  The  people  who  count  are  easily 
counted.  The  prophets,  poets,  and  painters,  the  thinkers  and 
teachers  of  the  world,  could  be  supported  by  the  State  at  the 
annual  cost  of  one  shell  sent  on  its  mission  of  d  sstruction  from 
a  seventccn-inch  gun.  It  is  a  splendid  opening  for  a  small  cap- 
italist. Fels  actually  did  subsidise  geniuses  of  various  sorts, 
much  as  Wedgwood  subsidised  Coleridge:  possibly  also  charla- 
tans. I  had  the  sense  of  his  being  surrounded  by  wild-cat 
schemes  and  schemers,  as  well  as  by  men  splendidly  devoted  to 
himself  and  the  common  cause.  Less  directly  he  subsidised 
scribes,  cspeciallv  of  the  single-tax  species.  A  book  on  the 
creed,  or  in  its  spirit,  he  would  buy  up  and  circulate  by  the 

338 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

hundred.  It  is  an  example  that  as  an  author  I  warmly  com- 
mend. Henry  George's  "  Progress  and  Poverty  "  he  of  course 
distributed  by  the  bushel  as  a  missionary  distributes  Bibles.  In 
my  own  capacity  as  a  heathen  savage  I  received  two  copies  in- 
scribed, "  It  is  to  learn."  I  never  got  a  letter  from  him  but  was 
surcharged  with  tracts,  mottoes,  and  verses.  He  was  my  bulk- 
iest correspondent ;  no  doubt  others,  too,  received  this  tuition 
by  correspondence.  As  he  appraised  men  by  their  soundness 
on  the  single-tax  and  despised  some  of  my  most  admired  friends, 
his  patience  towards  me  must  have  been  the  missionary's  hope 
of  his  prey.  Unless  it  was  that  his  interest  in  the  Jewish  ques- 
tion was  far  deeper  than  he  admitted  even  to  himself. 

Ill 

He  would  have  called  the  Ito  one  of  his  side-shows,  but  he 
never  wilfully  missed  a  committee  meeting  or  a  public  gathering, 
and  Ins  speeches  upon  our  platform  were  not  infrequent.  But 
though  he  never  neglected  the  opportunity  to  propagate  the 
single-tax,  he  could  not  have  entertained  more  than  a  shadowy 
prospect  of  propagating  it  practically  through  a  Jewish  State, 
and  if  his  purse  was  the  first  to  open  to  our  necessities  and  the 
last  to  close,  it  could  only  have  been  because  of  his  increasing 
perception  of  the  Jewish  tragedy.  He  contributed  liberally  to 
the  expenses  of  our  investigation  of  Cyrenaica  under  Professor 
Gregor}',  and  in  his  eagerness  to  hear  the  results  he  accom- 
panied me  to  Folkestone  to  meet  the  returning  expedition,  and 
keen  was  his  disappointment  to  learn  that  that  vaunted  land 
was  a  dangerous  desert  (as  the  Italian  Imperialists  who  burked 
our  report  have  since  found  to  their  cost) .  And  when  it  looked 
as  if  Portugal  in  her  fear  of  German  grabbing  would  concede 
Angola,  or  a  stretch  of  it,  for  Jewish  Colonisation,  the  new 
expedition  would  not  have  been  able  to  set  out  at  all  had  Fels 
not  generously  advanced  half  the  initial  outlay.  Nor  was  he 
by  any  means  a  passive  committee-man.  More  than  once  he 
tried  to  hustle  a  world  that  is  not  to  be  hustled,  to  poke  up 
Colonial  statesmen,  to  interview  business  men.  His  greatest 
feat  on  our  behalf  was  his  journey  to  Mexico  to  obtain  a  con- 
cession of  territory  from  President  Diaz.  That  great  if  not 
good  man  was  more  than  willing  to  facilitate  a  large  immigra- 
tion of  Jewish  industrial  and  commercial  workers,  but  did  not 
welcome  the  idea  of  a  special  territory  upon  an  agricultural 
basis.     It  has  just  transpired  that  thirty  years  ago  Diaz  him- 

339 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

self  sought  to  attract  a  large  Jewish  colonisation,  and  that  he 
was  even  willing  to  pay  the  expenses  of  a  scientific  commission 
to  investigate  his  offer.  Our  Organisation  was  not  then  in 
existence  to  educate  the  Jews  on  the  necessity  of  a  national 
home,  and  this,  like  many  another  chance  in  Canada  and  Aus- 
tralasia, was  let  slip.  History  does  not  go  back  on  itself,  and 
the  Ito,  like  Germany,  began  to  feel  it  had  come  into  colonisa- 
tion too  late. 

At  one  time  Fels  thought  that  a  tract  in  Paraguay,  which  he 
had  secured  for  the  purpose  of  obtaining  an  ingredient  of  his 
Fels-Naptha  soap,  might  afford  the  nucleus  of  the  desired  de- 
velopment, while  the  extracting  of  this  ingredient  would  afford 
employment  to  pioneer  immigrants,  and  help  the  early  stages  of 
colonisation.  It  was  a  scheme  that  would  have  made  both  of 
his  ends  meet.  I  remember  a  long  council-meeting  at  his  house 
with  his  Paraguay  agents,  when  we  worked  out  the  details,  but 
Paraguay,  already  the  scene  of  so  many  fantastic  and  socialis- 
tic experiments,  has  hitherto  remained  immune  from  ours.  Lat- 
terly, Fels  became  enthusiastic  for  a  Mesopotamia  scheme, 
which  I  had  publicly  broached,  but  his  zeal  for  which  owed 
perhaps  more  to  Zionism,  and  most  to  his  wife's  intuition  in  its 
favour;  an  intuition,  he  told  me  proudly,  that  had  never  been 
at  fault. 

IV 

So  far,  indeed,  was  he  beguiled  into  side-excursions  from  the 
high  road  of  the  single-tax  that  he  joined  the  department  of  the 
Ito  founded  to  regulate  emigration  in  view  of  needs  that  could 
not  await  the  foundation  of  a  State.  The  gravitation  of  the 
Jewish  masses  to  New  York  and  the  Eastern  cities  of  America 
had  produced  an  unhealthy  congestion,  and  to  avoid  the  slums 
and  competition  of  these  self-made  Ghettos  our  Emigration 
Regulation  Department  set  about  educating  the  Russian  masses, 
in  the  words  of  Horace  Greeley,  to  "  go  West."  They  were  to 
enter  by  Galveston  —  a  port  utterly  unknown  to  the  Russian 
Pale  —  and  thence  to  be  distributed  over  the  immense  region 
west  of  the  Mississippi.  Of  the  London  Committee,  constituted 
to  supervise  this  deflection  of  the  human  current,  Joseph  Fels 
was  an  original  member.  The  Committee  sat  in  the  historic 
building  of  the  Rothschilds  in  St.  Swithin's  Lane,  and  Mr.  Leo- 
pold de  Rothschild  acted  as  Honorary  Treasurer.  To  Fels 
this  alliance  with  the  high  priesthood  of  capitalism  was  some- 
thing of  a  pill,  but  he  swallowed  it  bravely  in  view  of  the  im- 

340 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

portance  of  the  work.  When  by  an  unconstitutional  caprice 
of  the  immigration  authorities  at  Washington,  a  large  batch  of 
brawny  emigrants  was  rejected  at  Galveston  on  the  plea  of 
"  poor  physique,"  and  I  travelled  across  the  North  Sea  to  meet 
the  unhappy  victims  deported  from  Ellis  Island  —  men  who 
had  sold  off  their  homes  in  Russia  and  were  now  thrown  back 
upon  Europe,  penniless  —  Fels  accompanied  me  to  Bremen  and 
worked  many  hours  at  the  task  of  mending  all  this  superfluous 
man-made  misery.  He  also  hunted  up  a  photographer  to 
prove  how  many  muscular  giants  the  party  contained,  and  as 
the  emigration  building  —  Stadt  Warsaw  —  held  likewise  nu- 
merous other  Jewish  transmigrants,  including  half  a  hundred 
children,  Fels  had  all  the  little  ones  photographed  in  a  group 
—  splendid  population-stuff  for  the  States  they  looked  —  and 
he  bought  up  all  the  sweets  in  the  establishment  for  them.  But 
then  children  were  always  a  weakness  of  his.  "  If  I  had  a  boy 
like  yours,"  he  said,  rebuking  my  paternal  stoicism,  "  I  should 
want  to  have  him  by  me  all  the  time." 


Fels  would  not  have  been  Fels  if  he  had  not  taken  advantage 
of  the  contiguity  with  the  late  Lord  Rothschild  to  seek  an  in- 
terview with  the  uncrowned  King  of  Jewry ;  not,  needless  to  say, 
in  any  courtier  spirit,  but  in  the  spirit  of  Catherine  of  Siena 
bearding  the  Pope  at  Avignon,  or  an  early  Quaker  lady  setting 
out  to  convert  the  Grand  Turk.  Whether  the  vices  of  cap- 
italism or  the  virtues  of  the  single-tax  formed  the  main  object 
of  this  mission  I  never  quite  understood.  But,  knowing  both 
my  men,  I  had  no  felicitous  augury  of  the  result.  For  Lord 
Rothschild  was  brusque,  deaf,  and  despotic,  and  Fels  cheery  and 
irrepressible.  The  meeting  was,  I  gathered,  brief.  Lord 
Rothschild  generally  secured  the  last  word  by  leaving  the  room 
abruptly,  and  it  is  unlikely  that  he  failed  to  apply  this  skilful 
dialectical  method  on  this  occasion.  What  is  certain  is  that 
Fels's  opinion  of  peers,  never  very  tropical,  fell  below  freezing 
point.  There  was  hardly  anybody  he  could  not  call  comrade 
or  brother,  but  I  suspect  that  his  sense  of  camaraderie  stopped 
thenceforward  at  Lord  Rothschild. 


341 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


VI 

His  notion  of  true  manhood  had  been  formed  at  the  feet  of 
his  neighbour,  Walt  Whitman,  and  it  was  k*  the  good  gray 
poet  "  who  inspired  that  general  enthusiasm  for  humanity  for 
which  Henry  George  provided  the  special  conduit.  The  read- 
ing of  "  Progress  and  Poverty  "  was  the  turning-point  in  his 
life.  It  whs  a  conversion,  a  rinding  of  salvation,  in  the  fullest, 
meaning  of  these  terms.  Thenceforth  he  had  a  creed  by  which 
to  live  and  die.  For,  of  course,  he  did  not  see  the  single-tax  like 
a  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  hailing  a  fruitful  fiscal  expedient, 
but  like  Abou  ben  Adhem  (may  his  tribe  increase  !),who  loved  his 
fellow-men,  and  like  Don  Quixote  out  to  charge  against  a  mon- 
strous wrong.  Henry  George  had  in  fact  more  to  give  than  a 
dry,  economic  device,  he  was  a  dynamic  emotional  impulse 
against  evil,  a  prophet  even  in  the  minor  sense  of  predicting. 
Nor  was  his  intellectual  contribution  to  political  economy  at 
all  negligible.  It  was  concrete  and  business-like,  or  it  would 
not  have  carried  away  a  keen  business  man  like  Fels,  who  had 
his  Sancho-Panza  side  and  when  another  business  man  tried  to 
best  him  felt  the  original  sin  in  him  leap  like  a  tiger  to  the  fray, 
much  as  the  hero  of  "  Les  Affaires  Sont  Les  Affaires  "  bristled 
for  business-combat  even  over  the  body  of  his  only  son.  The 
creator  of  Fels-Naptha  was  the  last  man  in  the  world  to  be  car- 
ried away  by  soft  soap.  Land  really  is  —  how-  can  one  deny 
it?  —  man's  indispensable  standing-ground;  no  nebulous  but  a 
very  solid  basis  for  an  economic  philosophy.  That  this  na- 
tional necessity  should  be  in  private  hands  is  clearly  discordant 
with  our  communal  thinking.  (Even  Stonehenge  has  been  sold, 
as  if  so  historic  a  stone  mystery  could  be  subject  to  the  whim 
of  a  proprietor  —  in  Italy- (3r  any  civilised  country  it  would  be 
a  "  national  monument.")  That  land  should  be  taxed  pecul- 
iarly -  or  even  gradually  taxed  away  without  compensation  — 
is  a  proposition  not  altogether  indefensible.  But  Fels  wrenl 
much  further.  He  had  so  convinced  himself  thai  private' land- 
ownership  was  the  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  the  taxation 
of  land  and  all  the  values  inherent  and  involved  in  it  took  on  so 
many  aspects  to  his  imagination,  that  he  beheld  all  life  enriched 
and  ameliorated  by  the  unflinching  application  of  his  golden 
rule.  Avenues  and  perspectives  innumerable  opened  up  to  his 
vision,  and  with  almost  perverted  ingenuity  lie  would  trace 
every  social  evil  to  its  root  in  Hie  monopolisation  of  land  val- 

842 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

ues.  Possibly  that  impassioned  passage  misled  him  in  which 
the  Master  cries  out :  "  It  is  this  that  turns  the  blessings  of 
material  progress  into  a  curse.  It  is  this  that  crowds  human 
beings  into  noisome  cellars  and  squalid  tenement  houses ;  that 
fills  prisons  and  brothels ;  that  goads  men  with  want  and  con- 
sumes them  with  greed ;  that  robs  women  of  grace  and  beauty  of 
perfect  womanhood;  that  takes  from  little  children  the  joy  and 
innocence  of  life's  morning." 

VII 

The  single-tax  is,  after  all,  only  a  fiscal  expedient  which 
would  lessen  the  financial  burdens  of  the  landless,  and  even  if  it 
increased  production  and  thus  diminished  Poverty  positively  as 
well  as  negatively,  Poverty  is,  alas !  only  one  of  the  many  roots 
of  human  misery,  and  were  all  the  prisons,  brothels,  ugly 
women  and  blighted  children  due  to  it  eliminated,  I  can  imagine 
these  phenomena  persisting  —  if  in  smaller  numbers  —  in  a 
world  of  general  Comfort.  It  was  not  poverty  that  Sodom  and 
Gomorrah  suffered  from.  Still  Poverty  is  such  a  Giant  De- 
spair that  to  despatch  him  at  a  stroke  would  be  an  achievement 
so  massive  that  the  single-taxers  need  hardly  put  their  claim 
higher.  But  their  cause  suffers  from  under-statement  as  well 
as  over-statement,  for  "  land-values  "  is  an  unfortunate  term 
which  to  the  vulgar  connotes  mostly  rent  or  price  per  acre, 
whereas  to  the  true  single-taxer  it  means  likewise  rent  or  price 
for  tramway,  railway,  lighting,  cable,  or  other  concessions,  and 
the  automatic  tapping  by  the  community  of  these  and  whatso- 
ever other  potentialities  of  profit  are  created  less  by  the  initia- 
tive of  the  individual  than  by  the  accretion  of  the  population, 
no  unit  of  which  has  earned  the  increment  arising  from  the  ag- 
gregation. It  is  a  concept  not  easily  distinguishable  —  in  this 
enlarged  form  —  from  Socialism  proper.  But  Fels  drew  the 
line  at  Socialism,  though  he  shared  its  spirit.  In  view  of  the  re- 
demptive efficiency  of  the  single-tax,  he  thought  it  superfluous. 
In  the  words  of  the  Master :  "  All  that  is  necessary  to  social 
regeneration  is  included  in  the  motto  of  those  Russian  patriots, 
sometimes  called  Nihilists  — '  Land  and  Libertv  ' !  " 


VIII 

If  I  occasionally  rallied  him  on  his   formula-of-all-work,   I 
was  none  the  less  aware  that  it  is  only  the  one-eyed  who  ac- 

343 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

complish  anything  in  the  world  of  action,  and  that  Argus  with 
his  hundred  eyes  proved  hopelessly  inefficient  at  his  one  job  of 
watching.  If  the  epithet  "  one-eyed  "  displeases,  let  it  be  re- 
placed by  "  single-eyed,"  which  carries  the  meaning  with  more 
dignity.  Fels  had  no  eye,  for  example,  for  the  sentimental  side 
of  land,  the  emotional  value  of  a  meadow  or  an  orchard  to  a 
family;  to  such  artistic  beauties  as  inhere  in  the  feudal  system 
of  great  estates  he  was  blind.  Burke,  according  to  Hazlitt, 
thought  it  as  absurd  to  reduce  all  mankind  to  the  same  insipid 
level  as  to  destroy  the  inequalities  of  surface  in  a  country  for 
the  benefit  of  agriculture  and  commerce.  Fels  thought  inequal- 
ities that  diminished  agriculture  and  commerce  not  picturesque, 
but  criminal.  The  great  landed  aristocracy  of  England  was 
anathema.  The  English  ideal  of  isolation  was  antipathetic 
to  his  American  passion  for  foregathering.  The  more  people 
enjoying  and  subdividing  a  piece  of  land,  the  merrier.  What 
right  had  you  to  cling  to  an  old  family  garden,  if  labourers 
lacked  land  for  their  cottages  or  the  villagers  plots  for  their 
potatoes?  That  there  were  imponderable  land-values,  by  which 
society  benefited,  even  though  immaterially  and  indirectly  —  as 
through  the  poems  and  pictures  and  thoughts  they  inspired  — 
he  would  not  admit.  There  was  something  of  an  inverted  Grad- 
grind  in  this  remorseless  pursuit  of  happiness  for  the  million. 

Nor  did  he  allow  sufficiently  for  the  fact  that  the  gospel  of 
Henry  George  arose  in  a  late  and  sophisticated  period  of  civ- 
ilisation, when  the  first  efforts  to  break  in  an  intractable  earth 
had  already  been  made,  and  land  had  ceased  to  have  its  original 
relation  with  pioneer  labour.  It  so  happened  that  the  Jewish 
Territorial  Organisation  brought  him  into  contact  with  the 
phase  of  the  problem  that  Henry  George  had  overlooked.  But 
even  the  fact  that  the  Ito  did  not  consider  Cyrenaica  worth  the 
cost  of  cultivation  or  irrigation  did  not  alter  his  sense  that  its 
land-values  should  be  taxed.  In  the  pioneering  stage  of  land- 
development  the  increment  is  by  no  means  unearned :  it  is  hard- 
earned  by  danger,  initiative,  and  capital.  That  at  a  later 
stage  the  landlord,  especially  in  growing  cities,  receives  a  fat 
and  disproportionate  increment  is  a  separate  question,  but  once 
land  has  been  treated  as  private  property,  transferable  like  any 
other  form,  society  can  only  gradually  undo  what  it  has  done. 
Fels  learnt  no  lesson  either  from  the  failure  of  his  Essex  ex- 
periment, "  Marylands,"  which  struck  me,  when  I  visited  it,  as 
a  melancholy  and  expensive  refutation  of  his  theories  of  the 
small  cultivator  and  the  converted  townsman.     Farming  is,  in 

344 


THE  VOICE  OF  JEKUSALEM 

fact,  an  expert  occupation,  and  the  value  of  land  qua  land  is 
absolutely  nil.  In  Canada  you  may  still  have  160  acres  for 
nothing  or,  rather,  in  exchange  for  your  pioneer  labour. 

On  the  other  hand,  Fels  did  splendidly  practical  and  suc- 
cessful work  by  his  Society  for  the  Cultivation  of  Waste  Spaces 
—  of  which  I  was  an  otiose  and  absent-bodied  member.  That 
is  an  enterprise  which,  started  long  before  the  war,  found  imita- 
tion in  more  than  one  of  the  belligerent  countries,  anxious  about 
the  food  supply.  And,  of  course,  in  estimating  his  practical 
achievements  one  must  not  forget  that  Fels-Naptha  has  light- 
ened washing-day  in  a  million  homes. 

IX 

If  Fels  owed  much  to  Walt  Whitman,  and  more  to  Henry 
George,  he  had  his  own  spiritual  power  welling  up  from  his  own 
racial  founts.  For  was  he  not  of  the  race  whose  prophet 
taught  land  nationalisation  over  three  thousand  years  before 
Henry  George,  and  whose  teachers  had  risen  —  even  before 
Jesus  —  from  the  brotherhood  of  Israel  to  the  thought  of  the 
brotherhood  of  the  nations?  It  is  not  without  significance  that 
Christians  pronounced  him  the  best  Christian  they  had  ever 
known.  He  and  I  had  a  good  chuckle  together  over  the  cor- 
respondent who  wrote  to  the  papers  to  ask  what  was  the  good 
of  Mr.  Joseph  Fels  trying  to  bring  the  land  to  the  people, 
when  alien  Jews  were  battening  upon  Britain?  He  himself 
knew  no  blank  page  between  the  Old  and  New  Testaments,  re- 
garding the  spiritual  tradition  as  continuous,  and  doubtless 
at  the  bottom  of  his  soul  he  believed  it  was  a  single-taxer  that 
drove  the  money  changers  out  of  the  Temple.  And,  in  truth, 
did  not  Jesus  say  he  was  come  to  fulfil  the  law  of  Moses,  not 
to  destroy  it?  We  know  as  a  fact  that  the  jubilee  provision 
of  the  Mosaic  land-laws  had  always  been  evaded.  But  Fels  had 
none  of  the  other-worldliness  which  often  adulterates  earthly 
goodness.  He  had  no  wish  to  "  lay  up  treasure  in  heaven." 
He  had  no  conception  of  future  reward  —  even  future  life  had 
been  left  by  Henry  George  as  a  mere  hope  —  but  he  wanted  to 
see  heaven  here  below.  He  wanted  to  see  with  his  own  eyes  the 
Kingdom  coming  nearer. 

Post-mortem  philanthropy  was  his  abhorrence.  His  money 
must  be  spent  here  and  now ;  indeed,  it  was  only  his  in  the  sense 
that  he  had  the  responsibility  of  its  spending.  To  denounce 
himself  as  a  capitalist,  fattening  on  the  labours  of  his  fellow- 

345 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

men,  was  no  rhetorical  figure  or  sensational  trick.  While  not 
unconscious  of  the  humour  of  his  situation,  and  even  with  a  cer- 
tain whimsical  enjoymenl  of  the  disconcertment  of  other  mem- 
bers of  his  firm,  he  had  a  genuine  conviction  of  sin,  which  could 
he  cancelled  only  by  restoring  his  business  profits  to  the  world's 
service.  lie  was  stained  with  the  crime  of  capitalism  —  he 
was  grubby  with  earth  privately  owned  •—  why  should  he  not 
use  his  soap  to  wash  himself  clean?  Hence  it  was  that  he  re- 
duced his  personal  expenditure  to  a  minimum,  eschewing,  for 
example,  Pullman  carriages  and  motor  ears,  and  riding  third- 
class  or  in  omnibuses.  True,  he  was  far  less  rich  than  the  ru- 
mour of  him,  but  then  his  donations  were  so  large,  his  feat  in 
financing  the  single-tax  movement  in  so  many  countries  so 
unique,  that  people,  never  guessing  he  was  giving  to  his  utmost, 
thought  his  gifts  mere  crumbs  from  the  millionaire's  table. 
They  more  nearly  represented  the  millionaire's  meal.  The  mil- 
lionaire, in  fact,  was  a  myth,  and  even  a  bit  of  a  fraud.  "  The 
more  I  give,  the  more  they  think  I've  got,''  he  said  to  me  once 
with  a  droll  twinkle.  The  more  he  gave  the  less  he  had,  and 
he  would  quite  cheerfully  have  gone  to  the  workhouse  to  ensure 
that  the  land  it  stood  on  should  revert  to  the  people. 

But  if  his  was  not  the  charity  that  gives  away  what  it  does 
not  want,  neither  was  it  the  charity  of  cheques.  "  You  mustn't 
give  money  and  not  yourself,"  he  said.  What  he  gave  in  time 
and  work,  in  self-consuming  zeal,  was  even  more  than  he  gave 
in  money.  No  journey  was  too  great  to  make  for  his  ideal. 
He  would  have  travelled  to  Tibet  to  educate  the  Grand  Lama, 
or  unflinchingly  addressed  Icelandic  audiences  in  Americanese. 
Nor  was  his  the  charity  that  breeds  charity.  He  hated  sub- 
scriptions to  perpetual  palliatives;  donations  that  pauperised 
and  not  redeemed.  Even  the  propping  up  of  art  and  artists 
began  to  appeal  less  to  him  when  he  realised  that  his  money 
scarcely  sufficed  for  his  central  mission.  The  Apostle  became 
jealous  of  the  Maecenas,  and  the  only  time  I  ever  saw  him  fly 
into  a  passion  was  against  himself.  The  thought  that  he  was 
letting  his  pockets  be  plucked  at  from  every  side  threw  him 
into  a  sudden  rage.  One  had  to  support  ideas,  not  individuals. 
The  ideas  would  ultimately  support  the  individuals.  A  distich 
conveying  this  moral  was  one  of  his  favourite  enclosures. 


346 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


Nevertheless,  Joe  Fels  was  no  lover  of  abstractions.  He  was 
always  surrounded  by  individuals,  not  all  of  whom  clung  to  him 
for  support,  though  he  rendered  friendly  services  to  them  all, 
from  prime  donne  to  professors,  from  musicians  to  Labour 
Members  or  masseurs.  Guests  of  every  nationality,  especially 
the  "  Bohemian,"  and  embracing  equally  poets  and  lady  laun- 
dresses, millenarian  meat-packers  and  vegetarians,  you  would 
always  find  at  his  house  in  Regent's  Park  —  indeed,  he  never 
seemed  to  "  live  unto  himself  alone."  And  with  his  erratic 
habit  of  dragging  one  home  to  eat  or  sleep,  he  must  have  had 
in  Mrs.  Fels  a  housekeeper,  as  well  as  a  hostess,  of  genius.  But 
all  his  motley  guests  were  made  into  one  happy  family,  and 
there  was  always  more  than  enough  to  eat,  if  not  always 
enough  to  sleep  on.  All  the  men  were  his  brothers  and  all  the 
women  his  sisters,  and  the  atmosphere  of  an  early  Christian 
agape  pervaded  these  meals,  eaten  as  if  in  communion. 

These  guests  of  his  included  some  of  the  most  distinguished 
persons  of  our  time,  and  it  is  no  small  tribute  to  his  fascination 
that  with  only  a  moderate  equipment  of  education,  with  no 
graces  of  breeding,  and  the  handicap  of  a  soap  business,  he 
was  able  to  attract  so  many  diverse  personalities.  It  was  the 
moral  core  of  the  man,  the  passion  of  faith,  which  raised  him 
to  equality  with  them,  nay,  that  made  them  his  inferiors,  and 
sometimes  his  conscious  inferiors.  Members  of  Parliament  ac- 
knowledged his  force  and  leadership.  He  had  confabulations 
with  Cabinet  Ministers.  Lie  inspired  a  band  of  workers  in  a 
dozen  countries.  He  was  received  in  Spain  with  the  honours  of 
a  prophet,  nor  was  he  without  honour  even  in  his  native  Amer- 
ica. Persons  who  spend  huge  sums  to  uplift  themselves  so- 
cially may  note  with  envy  at  how  small  a  money-price  it  is  pos- 
sible to  become  a  world-figure,  if  advertisement  is  the  last  thing 
you  are  thinking  of.  "  To  how  few  of  those  who  sow  the  seed," 
writes  Heni^  George  wistfully,  "  is  it  given  to  see  it  grow,  or 
even  with  certainty  know  that  it  will  grow."  Joseph  Fels  was 
one  of  the  fortunate  few.  His  death  was  sadly  premature,  but 
in  his  comparatively  brief  span  he  set  in  motion  historic  influ- 
ences, and  he  saw  them  begin  to  modify  history.  And  he  en- 
joyed his  success.  "  I  am  having  the  time  of  my  life,"  he  told 
me,  when  the  movement  began  to  hum  and  his  partners  to  be 
wroth.      Wherein  the  devotees  of  enjoyment  may  read  another 

347 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

lesson.  But  Mill  has  already  pointed  out  the  paradox  that 
happiness  comes  not  to  the  wilful  hunter,  if,  indeed,  it  had 
not  been  pointed  out  long  before  in  Galilee. 

Of  his  domestic  happiness  it  is  not  for  an  outsider  to  speak. 
But  it  may  be  recorded  without  indiscretion  that  he  once  said 
to  me:     "I  saw  my  wife  first  when  she  was  a  very  young  girl, 
and  I  made  up  my  mind  there  and  then  that  I  would  marry  no- 
body else."     The  two  were  cousins,  but  it  is  curious  that  they 
should  have  found  each  other  so  unerringly,  for,  though  equally 
rare  souls,  they  were  supplementary  rather  than   similar.     I 
remember  a  period  at  which  Mrs.  Fels  was  not  unreservedly  a 
devotee  of  the  single-tax  —  Female  Suffrage,  I  imagine,  ranked 
higher.     But  I  remember  no  time  at  which  Mr.  Fels  was  not 
unreservedly  a  devotee  of  Mrs.  Fels.     When  he  parted  with 
her  in  Piccadilly  —  to  meet  two  hours  later  in  Regent's  Park 
—  he  took  farewell  as  if  her  omnibus  were  a  liner  bearing  her 
across  the  seas.      It  was  an  inspiring  instance  of  his  delicate 
instinct  that  he  made  her  the  sole  and  unconditioned  beneficiary 
of  his  estate.     All-absorbing  as  his  passion  for  the  single-tax 
was  otherwise,  he  did  not  feel  it  had  the  right  to  absorb  her. 
But  here  as  often  love  and  wisdom  were  one,  and  the  abnegation 
of  his   cause  proved   the   road   to   its    continuance.     That   he 
died  when  he  did,  in  the  flush  of  his  hope  and  his  happiness, 
and  did  not  live  to  see  all  the  dreams  of  the  ages  mocked  by  a 
senseless  and  ineffably  ghastly  war,  is  no  tragedy,  so  far  as  he 
was  concerned.     We  may  even  rejoice  that  he  was  spared  see- 
ing  the   sinister   fulfilment   of    the   prophecy    of   the   Master: 
"  The  civilised  world  is  trembling  on  the  verge  of  a  great  move- 
ment.    Either  it  must  be  a  leap  upwards,  which  will  open  the 
way  to  advances  yet  undreamed  of,  or  it  must  be  a  plunge  down- 
ward, which  will  carry  us  back  toward  barbarism."     To  live  to 
see  the  grimmer  alternative  would  have  been  agony  to  this  man 
of  fellow-feeling.     But  for  the  world  it  is  tragic  to  be  bereft  of 
him  at  a  period  when  it  needs  every  glimmer  of  optimism  and 
aspiration.     And  for  his  friends  life  would  be  a  little  less  dark, 
had  we  still  the  sustainment  of  his  sunny  camaraderie,  his  in- 
domitable idealism,  his  breezy  pugnacity,  his  lovable  laughter. 
By  what  strange  prescience  was  it  that  Henry  George  prefixed 
to  the  concluding  chapter  of  his  Gospel  a  stanza  that  might 
have  been  written  for  the  passing  of  his  chief  disciple? 

"  The  days  of  the  nations  bear  no  trace 
Of  all  the  sunshine  so  far  foretold; 
348 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

The  cannon  speaks  in  the  teacher's  place  — 
The  age  is  weary  with  work  and  gold, 
And  high  hopes  wither,  and  memories  wane; 
On  hearths  and  altars  the  fires  are  dead; 
But  that  brave  faith  has  not  lived  in  vain  — 
And  this  is  all  that  our  watcher  said." 


II.  Joseph  Jacobs 

(In  Memoriam  Address  to  the  Jewish  Historical  Society, 
Feb.  22,  1916.) 


When  I  was  asked  by  Dr.  Israel  Abrahams  to  deliver  an  ad- 
dress in  memory  of  my  dear  friend,  Joseph  Jacobs,  I  was  well 
aware  how  much  less  qualified  I  was  than  himself  or  Mr.  Lucien 
Wolf  to  appraise  the  life-work  of  so  great  and  so  many-sided 
a  scholar.  But  a  hurried  meeting,  inspired  by  piety  for  the 
dead,  demands  affection  rather  than  exact  appreciation,  and 
Jacobs  was  more  than  an  admirable  Crichton,  he  was  a  prince 
of  good  fellows.  And  it  was  my  privilege  to  stand  for  nearly 
thirty  years  in  as  close  a  relation  to  him  as  any  other  of  that 
now  historic  and  increasingly  ghostly  circle  of  "  Wandering 
Jews,"  while  it  so  happened  that  in  his  last  passage  through 
England  in  the  Spring  of  1914  he  stayed  with  me  both  at  the 
Temple  and  in  the  country,  and  thus  gave  me  an  opportunity  of 
re-discovering  with  ever  fresh  surprise  the  abounding  humour 
as  well  as  the  encyclopaedic  allusiveness  of  his  conversation,  and 
the  gaiety  and  joie  de  vivre  which  neither  his  sixty  years  nor 
the  heart-weakness  he  had  come  abroad  to  cure  could  impair. 
I  remember  introducing  him  to  another  friend  of  mine,  also 
troubled  with  a  weak  heart,  and  they  had  what  Jacobs  called 
"  a  heart  to  heart  talk."  If  it  concerned  itself  at  all  with 
their  common  ailment  it  could  not  have  been  of  a  very  sombre 
character,  for  this  other  friend,  who  had  only  seen  Jacobs  that 
once,  said  to  me  on  hearing  of  his  death :  "  That  fountain  of 
fun  frozen !     Incredible  !  "     Alas  !  credo  quia  incredibile  est. 

But  with  this  radiant  image  before  me,  it  is  impossible  for  me 
to  clothe  him  for  you  in  Hamlet's  "  inky  cloak  "  or  "  customary 
suit  of  solemn  black."  He  was  bubbling  over,  not  only  with 
fun,  but  with  literary  projects,  one  of  the  smallest  of  which 
was  a  new  Encyclopaedia  of  a  quintessential  nature.  He  did  ac- 
tually arrange  with  his  old  friend  and  illustrator,  J.  D.  Batten, 

349 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

for  another  volume  of  their  famous  Fairy  Tales.  And  in  his 
un jaded  intellectual  curiosity  to  study  the  new  anti-Semitic 
wing  of  English  letters,  which  had  grown  up  so  oddly  during  his 
residence  in  America,  he  got  me  to  bring  him  together  with  Mr. 
Chesterton.  The  meeting  took  place  at  the  "  Cheshire  Cheese," 
where,  if  the  duel  of  Aryan  and  Semite  came  off  without  casual- 
ties, it  was  perhaps  because  I  had  prudently  made  provision  in 
the  spirit  of  one  of  the  Tosaphoth  of  Rabbi  Elchanan  trans- 
lated by  Jacobs  in  "The  Jews  of  Angevin  England."  "It  is 
surprising,"  comments  the  worthy  Rabbi,  "  that  in  the  land  of 
the  isle  the  Jews  are  lenient  in  the  matter  of  drinking  strong 
drinks  of  the  Gentiles  and  along  with  them.  .  .  .  But  perhaps 
as  there  would  be  great  ill-feeling  if  they  were  to  refrain  from 
this,  one  must  not  be  severe  on  them." 

At  a  time  when  Keats's  sad  line  is  more  than  ever  true,  when 
"  but  to  think  is  to  be  full  of  sorrow,"  it  seems  a  superfluous 
tragedy  that  the  extinction  of  so  vivid  and  valuable  a  life  should 
be  one  of  the  innumerable  by-products  of  the  homicidal  mania 
which  ravages  the  world,  cheapening  life  and  staling  death. 
Had  Jacobs  not  gone  to  Nauheim  for  a  cure  he  would  in  all 
probability  have  been  still  alive,  for  the  specialists,  he  wrote  to 
me  almost  apologetically,  considered  his  affection  slight.  He 
had  booked  his  passage  home  via  Naples.  But  he  was  caught  in 
Germany  by  the  mobilisation  half-an-hour  before  the  train 
reached  the  Italian  frontier  and  he  was  turned  out  at  a  wayside 
station  to  shift  for  himself.  He  managed  to  struggle  back  and 
up  to  Holland,  whence  he  crossed  to  England  again,  arriving 
more  dead  than  alive,  indeed  not  expected  to  live  through  the 
night.  But  under  the  kindly  care  of  the  Battens  he  rallied, 
and  my  last  glimpse  of  him  before  he  sailed  back  to  New  York 
was  in  their  spacious  suburban  garden,  alarmingly  ashen-faced 
indeed,  yet  mercurial  as  ever,  reading  old  volumes  of  Punch, 
and  full  of  the  side-lights  thrown  on  the  European  situation  by 
forgotten  cartoons. 

II 

Curiously  enough  my  very  last  encounter  with  Jacobs  was  — 
like  Chesterton's  first  —  a  duel,  though  by  correspondence,  for 
a  leader  in  the  American  Hebrav  in  which  I  recognised  his  hand 
had  demolished  me  as  a  theologian  —  doubtless  justly  enough 
—  but  on  the  insufficient  basis  of  my  remark  that  our  revered 
friend  Schechter  was  not  an  infallible  one.      Sweeping  me  aside 

350 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

as  old-fashioned,  Jacobs  asserted  that  the  Jewish  problem  — 
the  real  Jewish  problem  of  the  Bible's  breakdown  as  a  verbally 
inspired  document  —  had  been  solved  by  Schechter's  conception 
of  a  living  historic  tradition  and  the  inspiration  of  Catholic 
Israel.  I  wrote  to  point  out  that  it  was  exactly  this  concep- 
tion which  Schechter  had  repudiated.  By  a  tragic  coincidence 
I  was  writing  my  letter  on  the  very  Sunday  of  his  death,  and 
he  was  not  destined  to  receive  my  return-shot. 

But,  of  course,  Catholic  Israel  was  the  solution  which  he 
himself  favoured,  which  he  had  read  into  Schechter's.  It  was 
implicit  in  his  first  published,  and  alas !  his  most  brilliant  and 
creative  essay,  "  The  God  of  Israel,"  which  for  the  breadth 
of  its  sweep  and  the  mingled  boldness  and  sobriety  of  its  con- 
ception is  unparalleled  in  literature  as  the  work  of  a  young 
man  of  twenty-four.  At  an  age  when  destruction  is  as  natural 
to  the  thinker  as  to  a  kitten,  Jacobs  was  laying  down  lines  for 
the  spiritual  transit  not  only  of  Jewry  but  of  mankind. 
"  That  generations  of  men  have  held  the  Bible  sacred  must 
always  keep  it  sacred  for  us,"  said  this  astonishing  young  Rad- 
ical from  Australia,  who,  though  he  thought  the  future  was 
to  the  God  of  Spinoza,  rejected  Spinoza  himself  as  no  true  Jew 
because  he  lacked  "  that  historic  sense  of  communion  with  his 
people's  past  which  has  been  the  bond  that  kept  Judaism  alive 
through  the  ages."  "  Some  are  born  wise,"  said  Balthasar  Gra- 
cian,  the  pithy  Spaniard,  "  and  with  this  natural  advantage  en- 
ter upon  their  studies,  with  a  moiety  already  mastered."  No- 
body ever  illustrated  this  aphorism  more  aptly  than  the  young 
writer  who  was  one  day  to  translate  it  into  English.  What- 
ever we  may  think,  we  feel,  he  told  us,  what  our  ancestors 
thought,  and  our  descendants  will  feel  what  we  think.  That  a 
young  man  so  profound  and  so  poised,  who  had  enjoyed  the 
advantage  of  both  an  English  and  a  German  University,  and 
had  that  further  sense  of  the  relativity  of  values  which  comes 
from  belonging  to  two  communities,  should  become  a  great 
critic  was  inevitable.  But  even  the  paramount  position  of 
Jacobs  upon  the  Athenceum  in  the  days  when  the  position  of  the 
Athenawm  was  paramount,  did  not  provide  the  world  with  an 
adequate  equivalent  for  Iris  powers.  In  a  sane  society,  it  has 
always  seemed  to  me,  the  spiritual  treasures  of  its  members 
would  be  valued  as  much  as  coal  and  iron :  syndicates  would  be 
established  to  exploit  them.  That  so  much  of  Jacobs's  time, 
which  was  not  money  but  treasure  for  the  race,  should  have  been 
frittered  away  by  the  res  angwsta  domi  seems  to  me  the  real 

351 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

tragedy  of  his  fellow-citizens'  career.  He  was,  he  jested  — 
perhaps  not  without  bitterness  —  one  of  the  greatest  contribu- 
tors to  the  British  Museum  Catalogue.  And  indeed  from  that 
portentous  list  of  his  works,  it  is  not  unlikely  that  some  future 
German  scholar  will  demonstrate  that  there  must  have  been 
many  Joseph  Jacobses  that  had  got  confused  together:  if,  in- 
deed, the  list  did  not  represent  a  period  of  eponymous  clan- 
authorship. 

Some  of  these  works,  so  deftly  tossed  off,  will  surely  be  at- 
tributed to  his  next-door  neighbour  in  the  Jewish  Encyclopedia, 
Joseph  Jacobs,  the  English  conjuror,  known  as  Jacobs  the 
Wizard;  palmed  off  on  us,  to  speak  pat.  It  is  said  that  he 
edited  English  classics  by  Goldsmith,  Jane  Austen,  Thackeray, 
etc.,  etc.,  and  translated  Boccaccio.  But  even  his  hackwork,  so 
far  as  I  know  it,  his  editions  of  texts  —  of  Howell's  "  Familiar 
Letters,"  of  Painter's  "  Palace  of  Pleasure,"  of  "  The  Fables  of 
Bidpai,"  of  "  zEsop,"  of  "  Barlaam  and  Josaphat,"  of 
"  Reynard  the  Fox,"  of  "  Daphnis  and  Chloe  " —  provided 
monumental  examples  of  efficient  editorship,  with  introductions 
that  were  masterpieces  of  luminous  and  exhaustive  survey,  and 
notes  that  were  not  only  learned  but  more  readable  than  many 
texts.  Sometimes,  too,  he  made  brilliant  new  suggestions,  as 
when  by  correcting  final  Mem  into  the  almost  similar  Samech 
he  turned  the  fables  of  the  Talmudic  washermen  (Cobsim)  into 
those  of  Kybisses,  the  Greek  fabulist.  And  even  when  the 
learning  was  not  all  Jacobite,  even  when,  amid  the  dizzy  peaks 
and  crevasses  of  scholarship,  he  —  in  his  own  phrase  — "  tied 
himself  to  the  latest  German,"  the  stodgy  omniscience  of  his 
guide  was  transposed  into  a  key  of  gay  lucidity  that  made  it 
all  his  own. 

Sometimes,  indeed,  he  became  too  flippant,  as  when,  apropos 
of  the  seventh-century  discussion  whether  Christ  had  two  wills, 
or  whether  the  divine  and  human  wills  fused  together,  as  the 
Monotheletists  maintained  against  the  Dyotheletists,  he  pro- 
fessed himself  "  of  the  heresy  of  Lord  Dundreary."  In  his 
effort  not  to  impose  the  Teutonic  tax  on  the  reader  he  was 
peculiarly  rich  in  analytical  tables,  bird's-eye  views,  and  his- 
torical or  genealogical  trees.  In  his  remarkable  Jewish  Ency- 
clopedia article  on  Spinoza  he  even  invented  a  diagram,  repre- 
senting God  and  Nature,  Substance  and  Mode,  etc.,  etc.,  in 
luminous  lines  and  rays  —  a  sort  of  Metaphysics  without 
Tears. 

A  more  parochial  Jacobs  was  the  reconstructor  of  the  London 

352 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Jewry  of  1290,  the  pioneer  in  Anglo-Jewish  research,  who  by  a 
proverbial  pact  with  Mr.  Lucien  Wolf  limited  his  researches  to 
the  pre-Expulsion  period;  the  Jacobs  who  collaborated  in  the 
Anglo-Jewish  Exhibition,  and  in  its  epoch-making  catalogue, 
and  in  the  foundation  of  this  very  Historical  Society  of  which 
he  was  once  President.  This  is  also  the  Jacobs  of  that  fasci- 
nating olla  podrida,  "  The  Jews  of  Angevin  England,"  in  which 
like  a  bird  building  a  nest  of  straw  and  twigs  and  moss  and  odd 
trifles,  Jacobs  put  together  mouldering  twelfth-century  Pipe 
Rolls  of  the  English  Record  Office  with  disconnected  Rabbinic 
commentaries  and  museum-manuscripts  into  a  complete  working 
model  of  the  old  English  Ghetto.  We  see  the  mediaeval  Jew  as 
he  lived  and  moved  and  had  his  being,  cut  off  from  the  State 
because  cut  off  from  the  Church,  with  the  King  exploiting  the 
wealth  derived  from  the  usury  forbidden  by  the  Holy  Mother. 
It  is  an  ironic  picture,  sketched  by  Jacobs  with  a  reticent 
humour,  and  its  truth  is  evident  if  only  from  its  substantial 
accordance  with  the  Ghetto  projected  anew  by  the  Belloc- 
Chestertonian  school.  The  London  Jewry  of  1290  he  even 
reconstructed  house  by  house.  But  no  pioneer  can  hope  to  be 
final,  and  this  Jacobs,  like  others  of  the  clan,  sometimes  went 
wrong.  That  is  what  pioneers  are  for;  if  they  did  not  go 
wrong,  nobody  else  would  go  right.  I  note  without  surprise 
that  Jacobs's  severest  critic  —  Dr.  Stokes  —  is  also  his  greatest 
admirer.  Indeed,  the  best  testimony  to  the  value  of  Jacobs's 
researches  is  conveyed  by  a  single  word  in  Dr.  Stokes's  "  Studies 
in  Anglo-Jewish  History."  That  word  occurs  in  the  index, 
after  the  name  of  Joseph  Jacobs :  it  is  the  word  — "  passim." 

in 

There  is  a  third  Jacobs  —  the  student  of  Jewish  statistics, 
social,  vital,  and  anthropometric.  This  Jacobs,  who  was  per- 
haps the  Dr.  Jacobs,  was  a  disciple  of  Galton ;  he  impinged  on 
the  provinces  of  Mendel  and  Lombroso,  of  Wundt  and  Fechner ; 
he  was  tinged  by  Lazarus  and  Steinthal,  the  inventors  of  Folk- 
Psychology.  He  appears  to  have  flourished  mainly  between 
1886  and  1891.  He  wrote  in  the  Journal  of  the  Anthropo- 
logical Institute  on  the  "  Racial  Characteristics  of  Modern 
Jews,"  and  on  "  The  Comparative  Distribution  of  Jewish 
Talent,"  and  he  joined  forces  with  his  lifelong  friend,  Isidore 
Spielman,  to  study  "  The  Comparative  Anthropometry  of 
English  Jews,"  making  many  thousands  of  tests  both  in  the 

353 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

West  End  and  the  East  End.  I  remember  his  coming  down  to 
a  Jewish  school  and  instituting  memory-tests  by  dictating 
groups  of  figures.  His  deductions  from  the  results  constitute 
a  theory  of  "  Prehension,"  which,  as  published  in  Mind,  at 
once  won  a  place  in  Psychology.  I  also  remember  his  photo- 
graphing ten  boys  to  turn  them  into  a  composite  portrait  of 
the  Jewish  type.  My  brother  Louis,  now  a  member  of  your 
Council,  was  one  of  the  boys,  and,  like  Aaron's  rod,  he  appears 
to  have  swallowed  up  all  the  others,  for  the  final  type  w&s 
curiously  like  him.  Dr.  Maurice  Fishberg,  who  reproduces 
this  composite  portrait  in  his  book  in  the  Contemporary  Science 
Series,  entitled  "  The  Jews  " —  a  book,  let  me  remark,  in  which 
you  will  find  endless  facts  and  figures  and  everything  except  the 
jews  —  does  not  accept  Dr.  Jacobs's  conclusion  that  a  Jewish 
type  exists.  He  adduces  statistics  to  prove  that  even  the 
notorious  "  Jewish  nose  "  exists  in  only  13  per  cent,  of  our  race, 
while  nearly  60  per  cent,  have  actually  Greek  noses.  Nor  would 
the  modern  Mendelian  accept  Dr.  Jacobs's  theory  of  the  pre- 
potency of  the  Jewish  type  in  mixed  marriages;  Dr.  RcdclifFe 
Salaman,  indeed,  maintains  that  it  is  a  recessive  type.  When 
doctors  disagree,  the  layman  can  only  leave  them  wrangling. 
According  to  the  logic  of  Rabbi  Ishmael,  when  two  Bible-texts 
disagree,  a  third  text  will  always  be  found  to  reconcile  them. 
And  according  to  the  logic  of  Science,  when  two  doctors  dis- 
agree, a  third  doctor  will  always  be  found  to  contradict  both. 
That  is  how  Science  advances  —  it  is  a  Hegelian  progress  by 
contradiction  —  and  if  Dr.  Jacobs  had  only  left  his  successors 
something  to  contradict,  he  would  not  have  written  in  vain. 
But  I  am  certain  that,  here,  as  everywhere,  positive  results  of 
his  methods  and  outlook  will  remain.  Even  Fishberg,  who 
denies  his  theories  that  the  Jews  are  abnormally  long-headed 
or  big-brained,  concedes  that  he  was  the  first  to  analyse  truly 
the  causes  that  determine  the  nature  of  Jewish  occupations. 
It  was  probably  this  Dr.  Jacobs  to  whom  is  to  be  attributed  the 
elaborate  article  "  Statistics  "  in  the  Jewish  Encyclopedia,  with 
its  philosophical  principles,  its  wealth  of  information  both  con- 
temporary and  mediaeval,  and  its  careful  maps,  showing  the 
chief  centres  of  Jewish  population.  And  this  Jacobs  it  is  who 
appears  to  have  written  his  last  published  article  in  the  Ameri- 
can Hebrew,  pointing  out  that  Jews  are  now  established  in  some 
sixteen  hundred  centres  in  the  States. 

A  fourth  Joseph  Jacobs  made  his  reputation  as  a  Biblical 
Archaeologist.     He  discussed  "  Junior  Right  in  Genesis,"  and 

351 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

demanded  "Are  there  Totem  Clans  in  the  Old  Testament?" 
and  proffered  a  novel  explanation  of  the  Nethinim,  the  mys- 
terious Temple  attendants  mentioned  in  Nehemiah  and  Ezra. 
His  view  of  early  Hebrew  Totemism  was  inspired  by  Maclennan 
and  Robertson  Smith.  But  after  examining  Biblical,  Animal 
and  Plant  names,  Exogamy,  Ancestor  and  Animal  Worship, 
Forbidden  Food,  Tattooing  and  Clan  Crests,  and  the  Blood 
Feud,  he  ultimately  arrived  at  the  conclusion  that  the  evidence 
was  insufficient  to  show  that  such  primitive  social  clans,  with 
kinship  through  the  mothers  and  the  worship  of  an  animal  or 
plant  tattooed  on  the  members,  existed  in  Israel  in  historic 
times,  though  possibly  existing  among  the  Edomites. 

There  is  also  a  separate  Sephardic  Jacobs,  who  was  one  of  the 
first  Jews  to  return  to  Spain,  albeit  only  on  a  month's  visit  of 
exploration  and  exhumation  among  the  ancient  manuscripts  of 
its  libraries.  From  this  honeymoon  of  scholarship  he  brought 
back  copies  of  nearly  a  score  of  important  documents  and  over 
1,700  records.  This  Jacobs  did  for  Judaio-Spanish  history 
what  his  Ashkenazi  fellow-Jacobs  had  done  for  Anglo-Jewish 
Flistory,  and  his  "  Inquiry  into  the  Sources  of  the  History  of 
the  Jews  of  Spain "  laid  a  foundation  on  which  all  future 
historians  must  build.  The  Royal  Academy  of  Madrid  hon- 
oured itself  by  making  the  Jewish  scholar  a  Corresponding 
Member,  and  the  Jewish  scholar,  in  his  discourse  of  reception, 
finely  said:  "  I  welcome  in  my  election  one  of  the  many  signs 
that  Spain  has  learnt  with  regard  to  the  Jews  the  highest  and 
most  difficult  of  all  moral  lessons  —  to  forgive  those  we  have 
injured."  Possibly  the  Joseph  Jacobs  who  translated  the 
Spanish  maximist  should  be  classed  with  this  Jacobs,  or  possibly 
from  the  raciness  and  pungency  of  the  language  the  translation 
should  go  rather  with  the  next  group  of  Jacobses,  the  more 
literary  series,  to  which  belong  Jacobs  the  critic,  Jacobs  the 
necrologist,  Jacobs  the  historian  of  "  Geographical  Discovery  " 
and  of  "  Wonder  Voyages,"  Jacobs  the  historical  novelist,  the 
author  of  "  As  Others  Saw  Him,"  and,  most  popular  of  all, 
Jacobs  the  teller  of  fairy  tales,  English,  Celtic,  and  Indian. 
The  story-books  in  which  he  collaborated  with  the  artist, 
Batten  —  a  partnership  as  felicitous  as  that  of  Gilbert  with 
Sullivan  —  books  that  delighted  equally  the  nursery  and  the 
drawing-room,  with  their  coda  of  learned  notes  for  the  edifica- 
tion of  the  study,  revealed  at  once  a  great  raconteur  and  a  rare 
literary  artist,  for  many  of  these  tales  were  written  or  rewritten 
by  himself  for  the  nursery  in  defiance  of  the  purists  of  folk- 

355 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

lore,  who  thought  it  sacrilegious  to  alter  a  syllable  in  a  tradi- 
tional tale.  But  Jacobs  maintained  that  the  traditional  was 
the  transitional :  the  fact  that  a  story  was  first  heard  in  a 
certain  locality  was  no  proof  that  it  had  not  come  from  some- 
where else.  And  so  he  invented  an  idiom  for  these  tales  that  in 
its  racy  homeliness  and  mother-wit  flouted  even  respectable 
grammar.  It  was  the  same  instinct  for  language  that  served 
him  so  admirably  in  reviewing  the  Revised  Version  of  the  Bible. 
His  little  daughter,  May,  thought  he  wrote  these  Fairy  Tales 
for  her  alone;  that  affords  at  once  a  charming  glimpse  of  his 
domestic  side  and  a  sidelight  upon  popular  theology.  In  close 
affinity  with  Jacobs  the  tale-teller  stands  the  Jacobs  who  edited 
"  Folk-lore,"  and  midway  between  this  editor  and  the  Jewish 
Historian  stands  the  Jacobs  who  studied  "  The  Jewish  Diffusion 
of  Folk-Tales,"  or  reconstructed  by  the  same  scientific  methods 
the  homely  truth  behind  the  fatal  folk-tale  of  "  Little  St.  Hugh 
of  Lincoln,"  and  the  blood-legend  in  general.  And  this  brings 
me  to  the  Jacobs  whose  articles  in  the  Times  in  1882  roused  all 
Europe  against  the  pogroms  of  1881,  and  brought  about  the 
Mansion  House  Meetings,  and  the  Russo-Jewish  Fund  that  by 
a  premature  optimism  was  wound  up  shortly  before  another 
series  of  pogroms.  And  this  Jacobs  who  was  the  chief  con- 
tributor to  "  Darkest  Russia,"  and  who  seems  to  have  been 
active  again  in  1891  and  to  be  not  unconnected  with  the 
Bibliographer  of  "  The  Jewish  Question "  as  it  asked  and 
answered  itself  in  a  decade  of  pamphlets,  opens  out  a  perspec- 
tive of  further  Jacobses,  practical  Jacobses,  innumerable,  peak 
beyond  peak,  the  Jacobses  of  the  Anglo-Jewish  Association, 
and  the  Board  of  Deputies,  and  the  Conjoint  Committee,  and 
the  Hebrew  Literature  Society,  and  the  Jacobs  who  founded 
the  Anglo-Jewish  Year  Book,  and  gave  substance  to  the  Jewish 
Chronicle.  And  all  these  are  not  to  be  confused  with  the 
American  group  of  Jacobses  whose  career  begins  with  the 
twentieth  century,  when  they  are  seen  co-operating  in  the  Jew- 
ish Encyclopedia,  directing  the  Bureau  of  Jewish  Statistics  and 
Research,  editing  the  American  Hebrew  and  the  latest  Jewish- 
American  Year  Book,  teaching  Literature  and  Rhetoric  in  the 
Jewish  Theological  Seminary,  sitting  on  the  Committee  of  the 
Jewish  Publication  Society  and  partaking  as  Style  Editor  in 
its  new  translation  of  the  Bible,  comforting  Job  by  a  Com- 
mentary, reviewing  for  the  New  York  Times,  lecturing  to  Jewish 
Ladies  and  Literary  Circles  and  American  Colleges,  and  receiv- 
ing the  honorary  degree  Litt.D.  from  Philadelphia  University. 

356 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

To  trace  out,  inter-relate  and  appraise  all  these  activities  is 
beyond  my  powers.  In  Bulwer  Lytton's  posthumous  novel, 
"  The  Parisians,"  the  last  fragment  —  curiously  the  most 
memorable  passage  in  all  his  works  —  records  how  an  unfor- 
tunate resident  of  Paris  during  the  siege  is  finally  compelled  to 
sacrifice  his  pet  dog  to  his  own  necessities.  Wiping  his  mouth 
after  the  delicious  meal,  and  pensively  contemplating  the  bones 
upon  his  plate,  he  observes  with  rueful  tenderness :  "  How 
Fido  would  have  enjoyed  those  bones!"  I  cannot  resist  a 
similar  reflection  anent  our  lamented  friend.  How  Jacobs 
would  have  enjoyed  writing  this  necrology!  Who  else  could 
disentangle  this  veritable  Jewry  of  Jacobses,  study  "  The  Com- 
parative Distribution  of  Jewish  Talent  "  among  them,  and  put 
them  all  together  again  into  a  composite  photograph?  How 
he  would  have  revelled  in  drawing  up  one  of  his  famous  pedi- 
grees of  their  descent  and  kinship ! 

IV 

Even  the  literary  critic  who  flourished  in  England  under  his 
name  seems  to  resolve  in  twain.  There  was  the  aesthetic  critic 
pronouncing  his  judgments  in  the  grand  manner,  and  there  was 
the  analytical  critic,  who,  under  the  inspiration  of  his  friend, 
R.  G.  Moulton,  dreamed  of  an  inductive  science  of  criticism, 
which  should  study  the  text  of  the  masters  rather  than  presume 
to  judge  them.  This  Jacobs  aimed  at  nothing  less  than  "to 
reform  the  study  of  English  Literature  .  .  .  rescue  it  from  the 
clutches  of  those  vapouring  Oxonians,  Matthew  Arnold  and  the 
rest."  It  was  a  programme  after  the  Cambridge  heart,  con- 
ceived in  walks  in  the  Madingley  Road,  but  the  only  outcome 
seems  to  have  been  an  elaborate  study  of  "  In  Memoriam  " —  a 
vivisection  of  its  plan,  language  and  rhymes,  true  or  false, 
which  was  akin  to  the  Morelli  method  in  art,  but  which  has  had 
no  imitators  for  literature,  except  for  ancient  cases  of  disputed 
authorship,  notably  the  Bible  and  the  Shakespeare-Bacon 
stupidity.  Personally  I  prefer  the  Oxonian  manner  of  the 
other  Jacobs.  For  criticism,  though  it  may  be  a  science,  may 
also  be  an  art  —  a  super-art,  whose  subject-matter  is  the  art- 
creations  of  others.  His  necrologies  in  the  Athenceum,  his 
handling  of  George  Eliot,  Matthew  Arnold,  Robert  Browning, 
and,  mirabile  dictu,  John  Henry  Newman,  are  models  of  literary 
criticism,  far  more  artistic  and  less  scientific  than  he  thought. 

357 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

Indeed,  I  know  few  things  more  artistic  than  his  allegorical 
picture  of  the  vast  dis-jected  work  of  Browning  as  a  mansion 
whose  "  style  is  the  Gothic  with  a  curious  infusion  of  Italian 
Renaissance."  Particularly  happy  is  the  image  of  the  suite  of 
rooms  that  stands  for  "  The  Ring  and  the  Book."  "  In  each 
the  same  design,  in  itself  somewhat  repulsive,  is  repeated  in 
mirrors  of  different  shapes,  parabolic,  elliptical,  concave,  and 
the  rest,  distorting  the  image  in  each  case,  but  giving,  on  the 
whole,  a  curious  impression  of  reality."  It  is  a  metaphor  that 
might  well  serve  to  characterise  some  of  the  later  art  of  Henry 
James.  Of  Cardinal  Newman,  though  he  did  ample  justice  to 
the  saint  and  the  leader,  he  observed  drily :  "  His  histories 
are  unhistorical,  his  criticism  is  uncritical,  and  much  of  his 
theology  is  founded  on  his  history  and  his  criticism."  As  a 
critic,  indeed,  Jacobs  and  his  friend  Theodore  Watts  seem  to 
have  left  no  successors.  They  had  world-standards,  whereas 
there  are  now  none  at  all.  It  is  all  a  go-as-you-please,  with 
publishers,  if  not  authors,  writing  their  own  reviews,  and  every- 
thing coming  out  as  sixpenny  classics. 

If,  as  a  man  of  science,  Jacobs  was  sometimes  a  young  man 
in  a  hurry,  he  touched  no  branch  of  knowledge  which  he  did 
not  illuminate,  even  if  only  verbally.  No  German,  for  example, 
could  ever  condense  the  essence  of  paganism  into  the  phrase, 
"  the  worship  of  the  social  bond,"  though  every  German  has 
under  his  eye  this  paganism  in  practice.  Nor  could  the  preten- 
tiousness of  the  specialist  be  more  lightly  mocked  than  by  his 
little  dig  at  Professor  Saintsbury,  "  who  never  seems  to  read 
a  book  for  the  first  time."  By  taking  all  knowledge  for  his 
province  Jacobs  was  able,  if  not  to  equal  the  specialist  in  any 
department,  yet  to  be  superior  to  him  in  general  grasp  and 
perspective.  One  figures  Jacobs  as  an  aeroplanist  flashing 
over  the  world  of  knowledge,  and  though  he  frequently  descended 
to  make  microscopic  observations,  he  never  gave  you  those 
observations  from  the  ground,  but  always  from  the  machine  to 
which  he  had  climbed  back. 

It  was  part  of  this  universalist  temper  to  react  even  against 
literature  and  science.  Nearing  the  philosophic  forties,  he 
began  to  inveigh  against  literaturitis  —  authors  wrere  poor 
creatures:  for  knowledge  of  life  one  must  go  to  nurses  and 
grandmothers.  He  was  about  thirty-eight  when  he  translated 
Balthasar  Gracian's  "  Art  of  Worldly  Wisdom,"  and  half  in 
fun  but  half  in  earnest  he  would  produce  you  Sancho-Panza 
maxims    for    any    emergency,    some,    real    citations    from    his 

358 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

author,  some,  audacious  improvisations.  Gracian  was  only 
partly  a  Sancho  Panza,  and  there  was  not  wanting  the  spiritual 
strain  of  the  seventeenth-century  Jesuit;  how  else  could  the 
translation  have  been  dedicated  to  Jacobs'  devoted  friend,  Lady 
Lewis?  But  the  maxims  Jacobs  delighted  to  hurl  at  you  were 
practicalities  like  "  Know  to  get  your  price  for  things,"  "  Do 
pleasant  things  yourself,  unpleasant  through  others,"  or  "  Bet- 
ter mad  with  the  rest  of  the  world  than  wise  alone  " —  a  maxim1 
highly  popular  to-day.  I  fear  Gracian  did  not  really  help 
him  to  get  his  price  for  things,  for,  as  he  said  in  his  preface,  in 
explaining  why  men  of  letters  have  never  written  books  of 
maxims,  "  they  cannot  have  that  interest  in  action  and  its 
rewards  which  is  required  for  worldly  success,  or  else  they 
would  not  be  able  to  concentrate  their  thoughts  on  things  which 
they  consider  of  higher  import."  Yet  the  realisation  that  he 
had  reached  middle-age  without  finding  a  stable  financial  foot- 
ing may  have  contributed  to  that  general  sobering  which,  as 
the  great  Wordsworthian  Ode  puts  it,  comes  to  a  man  when 
the  vision  splendid  of  youth  fades  into  the  light  of  common 
day.  Like  Schopenhauer  he  prefixed  to  his  version  of  Gracian 
the  verse  of  Goethe,  which  declares  that  you  must  be  either 
hammer  or  anvil  —  Amboss  oder  Hammer  sein — and  he  was 
fond  of  quoting  it.  He  must  have  known  that  his  destiny  was 
to  be  anvil,  and  that  his  nearest  approach  to  the  hammer  was 
his  membership  of  the  Maccabseans.  In  that  drab  phase  of 
his,  Spinoza  gave  no  comfort;  he  doubted  whether  there  was 
anything  but  emptiness  in  his  old  Holy  of  Holies,  and  whether, 
as  he  puts  it,  life's  curtain  was  not  the  picture.  It  was  a  stage 
in  which  the  aimlessness  of  modern  Judaism  —  its  separateness 
for  separation's  sake  —  weighed  upon  him.  He  seemed  to  be 
waiting  for  his  people  to  be  worthy  of  its  long  tragedy.  "  If 
Israel  have  no  future,"  he  wrote  in  collecting  the  scattered 
essays  of  eighteen  years,  "  man's  past  has  no  clue."  If  the 
Jews  do  not  now  bring  about  the  triumph  of  their  ideals,  "  the 
long  travail  of  Israel  through  the  ages  has  been  for  naught, 
and  man  must  look  back  on  his  past,  and  forward  to  his  future, 
without  seeing  the  visible  presence  of  God." 

Solemn,  tragic  words !  In  the  very  year  he  was  writing 
them,  a  movement  was  arising  for  the  realisation  of  the  very 
ideal  his  first-written  essay  had  glorified.  But  the  Zionist 
doctrine  which  Jacobs  had  hailed  as  a  gospel  when  presented 
by  George  Eliot,  and  the  Zionist  passion  which  he  had  cele- 
brated in  Jehuda  Halevi,  seemed  to  him  paltry  and  materialistic 

359 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

when  adopted  by  I)r.  Herzl.  "  I  know  how  to  kill  Zionism,"  he 
said  to  me,  when  he  first  set  eyes  on  the  picturesque  figure  of 
its  founder,  "  Cut  off  Herzl's  beard !  "  That  was  not  merely 
Graeianism:  his  repugnance  to  Herzl  was  that  of  the  profound 
student  of  Jewish  problems  to  the  man  who  approached  them 
superficially  as  a  race-Jew ;  who,  occupied  solely  with  Tteol- 
politik',  was  —  at  first  at  least  —  quite  out  of  touch  with  the 
soul  of  the  people  or  the  faith.  And  Jacobs  was  not  wrong 
in  ever  keeping  steadfastly  before  the  fanatics  of  race  that  a 
narrow  interpretation  of  their  ideal  might  be  not  a  culmination 
but  an  anti-climax  to  Jewish  history.  Jacobs'  own  quest  for  a 
role  for  modern  Jewry  followed  spiritual  and  not  political 
horizons.  Regarding  the  spiritual  walls  of  the  Ghetto  as 
having  fallen  irreparably,  he  looked  for  the  Jews  either  to 
diffuse  the  specific  contributions  of  their  ethical  genius  —  such 
as  the  hallowing  of  history  —  or  to  form  a  nucleus  for  the 
brotherhood  of  the  nations.  He  did,  indeed,  logically  recognise 
the  Return  to  Zion  as  an  alternative,  but  like  Ibsen's  "  Lady 
From  the  Sea,"  who  longed  to  return  across  it  till  she  was 
permitted  to  —  when  the  yearning  died  —  the  concrete  project 
left  him  cold.  He  was  interested  more  in  the  thought  of 
returning  —  with  a  difference  —  to  Jesus,  and  taking  him  up 
into  the  apostolic  succession  of  Jewish  prophets.  A  great 
work  he  had  planned  upon  "  The  Jewish  Race  " —  a  work  of 
which,  alas !  only  a  feAv  chapters  have  been  written  —  was  to 
have  ended,  according  to  its  Synopsis,  with  the  sentiment: 
"  Pity  Jews  have,  by  conduct  of  Christians  in  Middle  Ages,  been 
debarred  from  knowledge  of  life  of  Jesus,  the  noblest  Jew  who 
has  lived,  though  not  the  most  Jewish."  The  same  note  —  that 
the  death  of  the  inspired  Galilean  Jew  could  no  more  than  the 
Affaire  Dreyfus  be  left  a  chose  jttfjee  —  is  struck  at  the  end  of 
"As  Others  Saw  Him":  that  anonymous  attempt  of  his  to 
re-write  the  Gospel  story  in  a  rationalistic  Jewish  setting,  and 
with  more  local  colour  than  the  large  method  of  the  Gospel 
narrative  vouchsafes.  "  O  Jesus,"  writes  the  scribe  who  re-tells 
the  story,  as  he  sums  up  the  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter, 
"  why  didst  thou  seem  to  care  not  for  aught  that  we  at  Jeru- 
salem cared  for?  Why,  arraigned  before  the  appointed  judges 
of  thy  people,  didst  thou  keep  silence  before  us,  and,  by  thus 
keeping  silent,  share  in  pronouncing  judgment  upon  thyself? 
We  have  slain  thee  as  the  Hellenes  have  slain  Socrates  their 
greatest,  and  our  punishment  will  be  as  theirs.  Then  will 
Israel  be  even  as  thou  wert,  despised  and  rejected  of  men  —  a 

360 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

nation  of  sorrows  among  the  nations.  But  Israel  is  greater 
than  any  of  his  sons,  and  the  day  will  come  when  he  will  know 
thee  as  his  greatest.  And  in  that  day  he  will  say  unto  thee, 
'  My  sons  have  slain  thee,  O  my  son,  and  thou  hast  shared  our 
guilt.'  " 

Not  that  Jacobs  was  enamoured  of  Christianity  as  the  Chris- 
tians have  understood  it.  I  shall  never  forget  his  disgust  when, 
having  restored  a  little  lost  child  to  its  parents,  he  was  told: 
"  Inasmuch  as  ye  have  done  it  unto  one  of  the  least  of  these  my 
brethren,  ye  have  done  it  unto  Me  1 "  "  A  simple,  natural 
thing  like  that !  "  he  fumed  to  me.  "  And  it  has  to  be  passed 
through  the  Christ."  But  if,  as  he  said  in  his  essay  on  "  Jewish 
Ideals,"  the  morality  of  the  Christian  may  result  in  gush, 
"  Judaism,"  he  pointed  out,  "  tends  to  confuse  morality,  law 
and  custom."  But  there  have  been  few  finer  interpretations  of 
Judaism  than  he  gave  in  this  essay  —  I  heard  it  originally  as 
a  lecture  in  the  underground  Essex  Hall  over  twenty-five  years 
ago,  and  it  has  remained  stamped  on  my  mind  as  vividly  as 
some  great  dramatic  performance.  Psychology,  philosophy, 
spirituality,  knowledge  of  life  and  cities,  all  went  to  its  making. 
I  would  give  a  library  of  abstract  theology  for  such  a  remark 
as  that  the  utility  of  religious  custom  is  "  to  create  a  fund  of 
tender  emotion  which  will  be  at  the  service  of  the  moralities." 
But  how  futile  it  seems  to  talk  of  spiritual  psychology  in  our 
world  of  cave-men ! 


On  "  Jacobs,  the  last  phase  "  I  have  already  touched.  That 
buoyant  temperament  had  reached  a  stage  which  promised  like 
the  old  age  of  Browning's  Rabbi  Ben  Ezra  to  be 

"  The  best  of  life  for  which  the  first  was  made." 

His  children  were  —  as  they  say  in  America  — "  making  good," 
and  he  was  cultivating  —  he  wrote  me  —  Uart  d'etre  grand- 
pere.  Theologically  too  he  had  reached  repose,  for  as  a  Sem- 
inary Professor  he  had  come  strongly  within  the  Schechterian 
orbit.  But  indeed  the  mood  of  spiritual  disillusionment  is 
near  akin  to  orthodoxy,  and  even  before  he  left  England  he  had 
begun  to  urge  that  "  logic  is  not  logical."  My  retort  always 
was  that  it  is  life  which  is  not  logical.  And  Jacobs'  life  was 
no  more  logical  than  mine  —  or  yours.  "  We  are  all  of  us 
artists  in  life,"  he  said  in  the  very  first  line  of  his  greatest  book, 

361 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

"  and  very  poor  daubs  most  of  us  make  of  it."  Jacobs  made 
anything  but  a  daub  of  his  life,  but  if  here  and  there  he  smudged 
the  picture,  the  tout  ensemble  is  assuredly  that  of  a  scholar  and 
thinker  who  lived  habitually  upon  an  exalted  plane.  There 
was,  a  generation  ago,  no  essentially  nobler  place  in  London 
than  the  little  Kilburn  study,  overflowing  with  all  the  latest 
volumes  of  literature,  philosophy  and  science,  in  which  Joseph 
Jacobs  carried  on  his  life  of  plain  living  and  high  thinking,  and 
from  which  he  justly  rebuked  the  push  and  aggressive  smartness 
of  Jewry  with  the  advice:  "Make  fools  of  your  children." 
For  all  his  swagger  of  worldly  wisdom  he  was  at  heart  the 
Parsifal,  the  pure  fool.  When  he  said  of  his  illustrator 
Batten,  "  What  should  I  or  other  English  children  do  without 
him?  "  he  was  speaking  truly.  In  dedicating  his  just  published 
volume  —  that  was  to  be  the  first  of  a  new  group  of  six  — 
"Europa's  Fairy  Tales"  to  "  Peggy "—  he  says,  "I  have 
told  again  the  fairy  tales  that  all  the  mummeys  of  Europe  have 
been  telling  their  little  Peggies,  oh  for  ever  so  many  years." 
Peggy  was  his  grand-daughter,  but  I  cannot  help  thinking  my 
own  little  Peggy  was  in  his  mind,  too,  for  he  and  she  had  fallen 
in  love  at  first  sight,  and  she  took  possession  of  him. 

Dante  placed  in  hell  the  man  who  was  gloomy  in  the  sweet 
air:  by  such  a  scale  of  valuations  Jacobs  should  be  placed  in 
the  seventh  heaven,  for  neither  his  tribulations,  deserved  or 
undeserved,  nor  his  scanty  material  reward,  could  ever  sour  him. 
In  truth  his  work  itself  was  his  reward.  People  often  speak  — 
especially  to-day  —  as  if  the  thinker's  life  was  one  of  less 
activity  and  less  essential  reality  than  that  of  the  man  of 
action.  It  is  a  gross  error.  The  thinker  is  active  in  a  world 
actually  more  real  for  man  than  that  merely  physical  environ- 
ment which  he  shares  with  the  animal  creation,  and  in  this  world 
he  may  have  as  great  moments  and  adventures  as  Cortez,  gazing 
with  a  wild  surmise, 

"  Silent    upon    a    peak    in    Darien." 

In  a  set  of  verses  prefixed  to  Jacobs'  edition  of  "  Barlaam 
and  Josaphat  "  I  said,  addressing  him : 

"  O  friend,  who  sittest  young  yet  wise, 
Beneath  the  Bo-tree's  shade, 
Confronting  life  with  kindly  eyes, 
A  scholar  unafraid 

362 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

To  follow  thought  to  any  sea, 
Or  back  to  any  fount !  " 

In  these  fearless  explorations  he  must  have  had  no  small  experi- 
ence of  the  hazards  and  thrills  of  the  spirit.  Not  seldom  he 
must  have  felt,  like  the  Ancient  Mariner,  he  was 

"  The  first  that  ever  burst 
Into  that  silent  sea." 

Did  he  however  bring  back  from  his  voyages  anything  of  lasting 
moment  to  mankind?  Was  there  any  great  adventure  com- 
mensurate with  the  undoubted  greatness  of  his  spirit,  was  there 
anything  worthy  of  its  compass,  its  insight,  its  many-sided 
knowledge,  its  Catholic  humanity?  That  we  shall  not  know 
till  we  read  —  if  we  ever  shall  read  —  his  magnum  opus, 
"  European  Ideals  —  A  Study  in  Origins,"  which  was  to  trace 
the  genesis  of  the  European  Mind.  Twenty  small  things  there 
are,  we  know,  but  in  literature  twenty  shillings  do  not  make  a 
sovereign. 

I  had  pinned  my  own  hopes  on  the  great  work  on  "  The 
Jewish  Race  "  to  the  Synopsis  of  which  I  have  already  referred. 
In  its  bare  self  this  Synopsis,  which  is  divided  into  Two  Books 
and  Sixty-Seven  Sections,  and  covers  the  whole  field  of  Jewish 
life,  is  more  instructive  and  illuminative  than  the  overwhelming 
majority  of  completed  books.  But  when  I  urged  him  to  finish 
it,  he  replied  by  sending  me  the  Synopsis  of  the  rival  great 
work,  no  longer  giving  up  to  the  Ghetto  what  was  meant  for 
mankind.  The  new  Synopsis  showed  a  work  conceived  on  the 
grand  scale,  in  which  all  his  gifts  and  knowledge  could  find 
expression  and  which  would  in  a  sense  even  absorb  the  Jewish 
opus.  Dr.  Israel  Abrahams  thinks  it  is  largely  or  wholly 
written.  If  so,  that  vast  absorbing  labour  would  explain  — 
and  even  justify  —  the  perfunctoriness  of  some  of  his  Ameri- 
can hackwork,  work  that  it  was  tragic  he  should  have  to  do 
at  all,  and  which  at  any  rate  must  have  prevented  him  from 
keeping  fully  up  to  date  with  his  colossal  subject.  For  he 
aimed  to  analyse  the  European  mind  with  almost  chemical 
exactness  into  its  Hebraic,  Hellenic,  and  other  constituents, 
and  since  he  wrote  his  Synopsis  a  mass  of  new  literature,  if  not 
new  light,  has  been  poured  forth,  some  of  it  apportioning  in 
novel  ratios  the  Hebraic  and  Hellenic  factors  even  in  Chris- 
tianity itself.  And  how  if  —  still  more  tragically  —  the  weari- 
ness evident  in  his  journalism  and  lecturing  had  passed  into  his 

363 


THE  VOICE  OP  JERUSALEM 

book?  It  Is  comforting  anyhow  to  see  from  his  last  signed 
article,  "  Liberalism  and  the  Jews,"  in  the  December  Menorah. 
that  his  hand  had  not  lost  its  cunning  nor  his  eye  its  ency- 
clopedic sweep.  The  description  of  Chutzpah  as  "  iridescent 
impudence  "  is  in  his  freshest  manner.  But  even  if  this  mag- 
num  opus  should  fail  us,  we  must  recall  his  own  summary  of 
Browning:  "  Aspiration  is  achievement."  If  his  life  is  destined 
to  leave  us  no  supremely  great  work,  yet  it  was  a  great  life, 
and  his  work  as  a  whole  leaves  a  great  lesson.1 

In  the  ardour  of  youth  he  was  prepared  to  trace  all  philos- 
ophy, science,  mysticism  and  religion  to  Jewish  sources.  But 
the  very  effort  to  trace  them  widened  his  outlook,  and  the  im- 
pression that  radiates  from  every  book  he  wrote  or  edited,  from 
every  table  or  pedigree  he  drew  up,  is  the  brotherhood  of  man. 
The  fairy  tales  told  in  Anglo-Saxon  nurseries  were  told  earlier 
or  later  to  the  duskier  ears  of  little  Hindoos,  the  japes  that 
gladdened  Slavonic  firesides  in  a  bleak  world  of  snow  brought 
glee  and  good-fellowship  in  the  sun-kissed  tents  of  Persia,  the 
homilies  that  edified  the  pious  Buddhist  in  the  tinkling  pagodas 
of  Cambodia  were  the  nutriment  of  Christian  souls  in  the 
thatched  cottages  of  France,  the  parables  that  enlivened  the 
expositions  of  the  Brahmins  of  Ceylon  relieved  equally  the  dull 
discourses  of  the  Mullahs,  mad  or  sane,  of  Nubia  and  Egypt, 
the  "  Chad  Gadya,"  sung  by  the  happy  Jew  on  his  Passover 
pillows,  was  a  Volkslied  in  the  steep  cobbled  streets  of  old 
German  towns.  The  Buddha  himself,  Jacobs  tells  us,  was  made 
a  Christian  Saint,  when  only  his  deeds  and  words  were  known 
and  not  his  name.  Vain  to  sunder  the  human  family  by  the 
artificial  boundaries  of  States,  religions,  countries,  ambitions, 
hatreds.  Underneath  and  through  it  all  goes  the  same  flesh 
and  blood,  and  the  human  nature  that  politicians  drive  out  with 

1  It  now  appears  that  the  article  "  Liberalism  and  the  Jews  "  formed  a 
chapter  of  a  work  called  "  Jewish  Contributions  to  Civilisation,"  which 
seems  to  be  a  cross  between  the  two  long-projected  works,  "The  Jewish 
Race:  A  Study  of  National  Character"  and  "  European  Ideals:  A  Study  in 
Origins."  Thus  these  two  "enchanted  cigarettes" — to  borrow  Balzac's 
term  for  projected  works  —  did  not  end  altogether  in  smoke.  But  unfor- 
tunately, even  of  "Jewish  Contributions  to  Civilisation,"  only  one  of  the 
three  volumes  was  left  in  presentable  shape.  Nevertheless  this  first  vol- 
ume contains  the  quintessence  of  his  thought  and  research,  and  includes  a 
magnificent  introductory  summary,  and,  though  it  was  denied  the  final  re- 
vision of  the  master  hand,  yet  by  the  sobriety  and  objectivity  of  its  views 
and  the  breadth  of  its  information,  it  must  long  remain  the  authority  on 
the  historic  relations  of  Jews  and  Judaism  to  the  Church,  to  the  State,  to 
Capital  and  Commerce,  to  Politics,  and  to  Science  and  Philosophy.  If  it 
has  a  fault  it  is  that  of  over-meekness  in  its  exposition  of  the  "  Jewish  Con- 
tributions to  Civilisation." 

364 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

a  pitchfork  reasserts  itself  in  all  its  divine  identity  with  a  song 
or  a  proverb.  Hath  not  a  Jew  eyes,  and  if  you  prick  a  Chris- 
tian will  he  not  bleed?  It  is  because  the  work  of  Jacobs  is 
saturated  in  every  pore  with  this  conception,  that  I  would  write 
for  his  epitaph  not  merely  that  he  was  a  great  Jew,  but  that  he 
was  also  —  and  perhaps  the  two  are  really  one  —  a  great 
humanist. 


365 


THE  PILLAR  OF  FIRE 

{From  the  Russian  of  Bunin.) 

We  wandered  through  the  boundless  sand, 

The  long  and  burning  day, 
A  cloudy  pillar  led  our  band 

Where  shining  pastures  lay. 

But  now  'tis  sweet  to  breathe  —  night  falls, 

Mirages,  mists  disband, 
Jehovah's  flaming  column  calls 

Towards  the  Promised  Land. 


366 


EPILOGUE:  THE  MAJESTY  OF  ARMENIA 

"  I  saw  all  our  women  and  my  mother  torn  to  pieces  by  the 
monsters  who  disputed  for  possession  of  them,"  says  the  old 
Princess  in  "  Candide,"  "  and  I  was  left  for  dead  amid  a  heap 
of  corpses.  For  three  hundred  leagues  around  similar  scenes 
were  going  on  —  without  any  omission  in  the  five  prayers  a  day 
prescribed  by  Mahomet."  It  is  impossible  in  reading  the 
evidence  as  to  the  treatment  of  the  Armenians  in  the  Ottoman 
Empire  not  to  be  reminded  of  this  and  other  episodes  by  which 
Voltaire  strove  to  disconcert  the  optimism  of  his  Pangloss  — 
episodes  which,  however,  seemed  to  transcend  the  licence  of  even 
satirical  invention  and  to  have  no  warrant  in  the  actual  facts 
of  mediaeval  history.  Alas,  we  now  know  that  Voltaire's  imag- 
ination fell  below,  not  exceeded,  the  diabolism  of  human  nature 
at  those  moments  when,  maddened  by  war-lust  —  aggravated 
let  us  charitably  admit  by  war-panic  —  it  returns  to  that  pre- 
historic animal  nature  through  which  the  soul  has  slowly 
struggled. 

From  more  than  one  area  of  the  war-zone,  from  Belgium, 
from  Galicia,  from  Turkish  Armenia,  the  same  story  has 
reached  us :  the  same  dread  saga  of  the  Avanderings  of  whole 
populations,  under  the  spur  of  massacre,  rape,  hunger.  Little 
children  fall  like  flies  by  the  wayside,  and  new  children  are  born 
on  the  march.  Mothers  go  mad.  Girls  throw  themselves  into 
the  rivers.  Men  are  killed  and  buried  like  dogs.  Torture 
becomes  a  commonplace.      There  is  even  cannibalism. 

But  Belgium  had  almost  all  the  world  for  her  friends,  and  the 
faith  in  restoration  went  before  her  exiles  like  a  pillar  of  cloud 
by  day  and  a  pillar  of  fire  by  night.  Even  the  Jews  of  the 
Pale  —  torn  and  tossed  between  the  alternate  victors  —  found 
a  helping  hand,  and  begin  to  behold  some  faint  gleam  of  Zion 
upon  the  political  horizon.  On  Ararat  alone  no  Ark  can  rest. 
For  Armenia  alone  there  is  the  cry  without  answer :  "  Watch- 
man, what  of  the  night?  " 

For  Armenia  alone  there  is  no  "  Mandatory  " —  she  cannot 
find  protection  even  in  the  lion's  den  or  the  eagle's  nest.  There 
is  neither  oil  nor  gold  nor  aught  worth  the  cost  of  defending 
her.     The  nations,  eager  to  mother  more  oleaginous  or  aureate 

367 


THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 

territories,  so  eager  that  they  will  be  at  one  another's  throats 
rather  than  forgo  their  loving  labour,  here  vie  with  one  another 
only  in  their  solicitousness  to  offer  the  task  to  America. 

Sister-nations  —  I  have  been  accustomed  to  think  —  the 
Armenians  and  the  Jews.  Both  hail  from  sister-lands  of  the 
cradle  of  civilisation,  both  come  trailing  clouds  of  glory  from 
the  purpureal  days  of  Persia  and  Babylon,  both  have  borne 
the  shock  of  the  ancient  and  mediaeval  empires  and  of  the  mili- 
tant migrations  of  their  races,  and  both  hold  to  their  original 
faith ;  for  if  the  one  was  the  first  preacher  of  Jehovah,  the 
other  was  the  first  nation  to  profess  Jesus.  And  sisters,  too,  in 
sorrow,  I  thought:  exiled,  scattered,  persecuted,  massacred. 

Sisters  in  sooth,  yet  not  equal  in  suffering.  Hitherto, 
through  the  long  centuries,  the  crown  of  martyrdom  has  been 
pre-eminently  Israel's.  And  as,  day  by  day  during  this  war 
of  ours,  there  came  to  me  by  dark  letter  or  whisper  the  tale  of 
her  woes  in  the  central  war-zone,  I  said  to  myself:  "  Surely  the 
cup  is  full:  surely  no  people  on  earth  has  such  a  measure  of  gall 
and  vinegar  to  drain." 

But  I  was  mistaken.  One  people  is  suffering  more.  That 
people,  whose  ancient  realm  held  the  legendary  Eden,  has  now 
for  abiding  place  the  pit  of  Hell.  I  bow  before  this  higher 
majesty  of  sorrow.  I  take  the  crown  of  thorns  from  Israel's 
head  and  I  place  it  upon  Armenia's. 


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368 


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THE  VOICE  OF  JERUSALEM 


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